Criminalisation just dopey

There is much debate over the effects of marijuana.

Sometimes events overtake my intentions. I'd been reading the scientific literature on drugs and social policy, hoping to gain a balanced and critical view of the looming possibility of decriminalisation and even legalisation of drug use for adults. Then legalisation of cannabis in Uruguay and especially in Colorado occurred and opponents of legalisation emerged.

The problem isn't that there's not enough research into cannabis. The problem is that when seeking a balance between opposing views - to seek facts, not ideology - the science supporting opposition to legalisation is so weak.

Opponents recite the statistic that one out of six adolescents will become addicted. Leaving aside the flawed concept of addiction, an opiate-based misconception with little applicability to cannabis, the quoted figure is questionable. It is based on one retrospective study of 18-year-old frequent users. A recent review found the figure for dependency-potential in adolescents was closer to one in 17.

Colorado's law restricts cannabis to those over 21.

More significant is the study quoted in The Lancet linking smoking marijuana to later onset of schizophrenia. That study of Swedish users does contend a rate of later schizophrenia 2.4 times that of non-users. However, schizophrenia is relatively rare. The incidence in Sweden is 0.0018 per cent. Putting aside issues of diagnostic accuracy and factors that may be common to drug use and mental illness, 2.4 x 0.0018 is still a very low number.

Cannabis has been known and grown for thousands of years. Research into its effects is not new either. In 1894, on request from Parliament, the Indian Hemp Commission undertook to address questions about marijuana, its effects, physical and mental and its relationship to insanity and to crime.

The tough-minded commissioners concluded after a year of interviewing users, growers and medical experts (1455 in all) that cannabis was essentially harmless, but it may have medicinal qualities. Its relation to insanity was tenuous, as was its relation to crime. This from colonialist bureaucrats.

The 1944 study by the New York Academy of Sciences, "the Mayor's committee on Marihuana", reached similar conclusions. So too did the Sheafer Commission's report, a 1972 federal study appointed by Richard Nixon and consisting of prosecutors and police chiefs. The report, which was suppressed by Nixon, recommended decriminalisation, although several commissioners favoured legalisation.

If the science is flawed, what about the social policy? The present prohibition and criminalisation has been a manifest failure since 1937 in the US, when marijuana was added to cocaine and opiates as a prohibited drug. The legislation was born in racist theories of rampant cannabis use by Mexicans and negroes. Congress passed it over objections by the counsel to the American Medical Association.

Criminalisation as a means to curtail cannabis use is a cure that is worse than the disease. It spawns a black market.

The attendant growth of profitable criminal enterprise then becomes violent in protection of its profits. Mexico is the best example, where the profits make corruption inevitable.

Criminalisation has also created a large bureaucratic enforcement enterprise whose existence and employment paradoxically depend on a continuation of crime.

Criminalisation puts users at risk of imprisonment for sentences that sometimes exceed those for violent crimes.

Conviction for a drug offence imperils the educational opportunities and future employment of a young user. Moreover, while use incidence is equal for all races, arrests (and prison) are disproportionately more likely for blacks and Latinos.

Then there is the effect on democracy when millions flout the law and begin to doubt the legitimacy of laws in general.

If one needs example of the inequities of drug prohibition enforcement and the deficiencies of the supporting argument of government saving its citizens from self-induced harm, one need look no further than the White House. Two of the last three presidents have admitted to marijuana use. As has one Supreme Court Justice.

None of these people appear ashamed at enforcing the law against it. Maybe they should.

Let the debate begin here.

Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.