cannabisnews.com: Pot Report Challenges `Zero Tolerance'





Pot Report Challenges `Zero Tolerance'
Posted by FoM on March 19, 1999 at 21:16:42 PT

Government study undercuts premise of national policyThe long-awaited government-commissioned report on marijuana that was issued Wednesday may have dealt with the drug's medicinal uses, but it has also opened a debate into marijuana's longstanding role as linchpin of a national policy of ``zero tolerance'' toward illicit drugs.
In addressing issues like whether marijuana was a gateway to the use of harder drugs (the researchers found no convincing evidence that it was), the report used language calculated not to overstep the bounds of scientific inquiry into the arena of political argument.But the very nature of the report was contrary to the government's usual inclination against acknowledging any merit at all in marijuana use, and advocates on both sides of the issue seized on it.The authors -- 11 independent experts at the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences -- found that marijuana smoke was even more toxic than tobacco smoke and could cause cancer, lung damage and pregnancy complications.As a result, they said, marijuana should be smoked only by patients in whom long-term effects are not of great concern, like the terminally ill, and even then under tight control. Nonetheless, they said, marijuana's active ingredients appear to be effective for treating pain, nausea and the severe weight loss associated with AIDS.Pot foes speaking outThe White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which ordered and financed the two-year study after voters in California and Arizona endorsed medicinal use of marijuana in 1996 referendums, has had little comment on the report beyond endorsing its call for further research, saying science alone should determine what is safe and effective medicine.But other marijuana opponents have been more outspoken. ``The only issue from a policy point of view is whether smoked marijuana is a viable medicine for the treatment for anything, and the report virtually says no, which is very important,'' said Dr. Robert DuPont, clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School. ``People don't go to their pharmacy and get a prescription for burning leaves.''On the other hand, advocates of a more liberal approach to drugs see the report as a catalyst to force the government to rethink its zero-tolerance policy. ``The release of this report is the beginning of a process, not the end,'' said Bill Zimmerman, executive director of Americans for Medical Rights, which has sponsored medicinal-marijuana initiatives in a dozen states. ``It will provoke all kinds of activity across the country.''The government's longtime position -- that marijuana is a dangerous drug that cannot be tolerated any more than cocaine or heroin -- has not been helped by the fact that as many as 60 million Americans, including President Clinton, have tried it, most with no significant aftereffect. Further, the government's policy has been predicated on the assumption that smoking marijuana can lead nowhere but to the abuse of harder drugs, an outlook that the authors contradicted.Officials' stand faultedMedicinal marijuana was chosen as a ``wedge issue'' several years ago by people who wanted to move drug policy in a softer direction, said Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy at the University of California-Los Angeles. Government officials could have neutralized the issue, Kleiman said, by agreeing to strictly medicinal use of the drug, but instead ``they had to be against marijuana for any use, and as a result they handed a wonderful issue to their opponents.''The government's opposition to medicinal use ``is one of the most readily comprehensible excesses of the war on drugs,'' said Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, which promotes liberalized alternatives to current drug policy. ``It's one that most Americans understand: that arresting patients is not right.''Others, though, see a freewheeling public debate about medicinal marijuana as a path that can lead only to acceptance of the drug's recreational use.``Anything that is going to make marijuana use by adolescents a more likely event is going to be a terrible blow to the efforts we are making to remedy the problem of raising children in America,'' said Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, president of Phoenix House, the nationwide network of drug-treatment centers.Dr. Herbert D. Kleber, one of 13 experts who reviewed the report for the Institute of Medicine before its release, said it set high standards for justifying the medicinal use of marijuana. But Kleber, medical director of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, also called the report ``that kind of thing where people can take sound bites to bolster whatever position they want.''BY CHRISTOPHER S. WRENNew York Times http://www7.mercurycenter.com/premium/nation/docs/marijuana19.htm
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