Quote:

---

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) ruled on Friday that marijuana has "no accepted medical use" and should therefore remain illegal under federal law — regardless of conflicting state legislation allowing medical marijuana and despite hundreds of studies and centuries of medical practice attesting to the drug's benefits.
The judgment came in response to a 2002 petition by supporters of medical marijuana, which called on the government to reclassify cannabis, which is currently a Schedule I drug — like heroin, illegal for all uses — and to place it in Schedule III, IV or V, which would allow for common medical uses.
The DEA ruled that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States," has a "high potential for abuse," and "lacks an acceptable level of safety for use even under medical supervision."

Not only does this decision conflict with state laws, however, it also conflicts with a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the branch of the National Academy of Sciences charged with answering complex medical questions for Congress. Way back in 1999, the IOM said:

Quote:

---

Scientific data indicate the potential therapeutic value of cannabinoid drugs, primarily THC, for pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation

---

In addition, in 2006 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an investigational new drug application, or IND — which grants permission to study a drug with the goal of approving it for marketing if it is safe and effective — for Sativex, an inhalable marijuana-derived drug, which includes both THC and CBD, the main active components of cannabis. So, while one federal agency says the drug is too risky for use even under medical supervision, another is studying it for possible approval for marketing.

The synthetic marijuana-based drugs nabilone and dronabinol (both used to treat nausea and vomiting) are already approved in the U.S. and have been placed in Schedules II and III, respectively. Schedule II includes drugs with high abuse potential like Oxycontin, while Schedule III includes milder painkillers like codeine combined with Tylenol,

Since the IOM report was released more than a decade ago, the evidence for the medical benefits of marijuana and related drugs has continued to increase. In the last three years alone, cannabinoids have been found to help kill breast cancer cells, fight liver cancer, reduce inflammation, have antipsychotic effects and even potentially help stave off the development of Alzheimer's disease and reduce progression of Huntington's disease. Further, a 2011 review of the effectiveness of cannabinoids for non-cancer pain found "no significant adverse effects" and "significant" analgesic effects.

Although the DEA judgment sounds like a setback for medical marijuana advocates, in one important sense it is an advance. The government had long delayed making a judgment on the petition, but now that it has, it makes it possible for advocates to appeal it in federal court. Now, that process can be set in motion.

---

Quote:

---

Of all the arguments that have been used to demonize marijuana, few have been more powerful than that of the "gateway effect": the notion that while marijuana itself may not be especially dangerous, it ineluctably leads to harder drugs like heroin and cocaine.

The idea that marijuana may be the first step in a longer career of drug use seems plausible at first: when addicts tell their histories, many begin with a story about marijuana. And there's a strong correlation between marijuana use and other drug use: a person who smokes marijuana is more than 104 times more likely to use cocaine than a person who never tries pot, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The problem here is that correlation isn't cause. Hell's Angels motorcycle gang members are probably more 104 times more likely to have ridden a bicycle as a kid than those who don't become Hell's Angels, but that doesn't mean that riding a two-wheeler is a "gateway" to joining a motorcycle gang. It simply means that most people ride bikes and the kind of people who don't are highly unlikely to ever ride a motorcycle.
Scientists long ago abandoned the idea that marijuana causes users to try other drugs: as far back as 1999, in a report commissioned by Congress to look at the possible dangers of medical marijuana, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences wrote:

Quote:

---

Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are strikingly regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana — usually before they are of legal age.

In the sense that marijuana use typically precedes rather than follows initiation of other illicit drug use, it is indeed a "gateway" drug. But because underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely the first, "gateway" to illicit drug use. There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.

---

Since then, numerous other studies have failed to support the gateway idea. Every year, the federal government funds two huge surveys on drug use in the population. Over and over they find that the number of people who try marijuana dwarfs that for cocaine or heroin. For example, in 2009, 2.3 million people reported trying pot — compared with 617,000 who tried cocaine and 180,000 who tried heroin

Holland began liberalizing its marijuana laws in part to close this particular gateway — and indeed now the country has slightly fewer young pot-smokers who move on to harder drugs compared with other nations, including the U.S. A 2010 Rand Institute report titled "What Can We Learn from the Dutch Cannabis Coffeeshop Experience?" found that there was "some evidence" for a "weakened gateway" in The Netherlands, and concluded that the data "clearly challenge any claim that the Dutch have strengthened the gateway to hard drug use."

Of course, that's not the gateway argument favored by supporters of our current drug policy — but it is the one supported by science.

---

Quote:

---

June 17 marked the 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of war on drugs, an effort that has cost the U.S. $1 trillion to date. What have we gotten for our investment?

Not much that's good. Drug use in the U.S. has dropped since its peak in 1979, when surveys showed that 54% of high school seniors reported using an illegal drug at least once in the past year; that proportion has bounced up and down since 1988 and has settled at about 38%. But the rate of the most dangerous type of drug use — daily use — has remained virtually unchanged since 1975 for marijuana, cocaine and opioids.

The big problem, of course, is that the U.S. insists on treating what is a medical and social issue as a criminal one. That trillion dollars has been misspent, as my colleague Tim Padgett argues on Global Spin:

Two-thirds or more of Washington's $15 billion annual anti-drug budget is spent on conventional interdiction, but half should be going to drug rehab and other demand-reducing devices. ... Since as early as 1994, research has shown that the societal costs of the drug war, from prison cells to productivity loss, drop appreciably more — 14 times more in one Rand Corporation study — when a dollar is spent on drug treatment instead of on law enforcement."

But what gets glossed over in that calculation is that our national drug strategy not only fails to improve Americans' well-being and health, but in many ways endangers it. So to mark its 40th year, Healthland notes the drug war's 10 worst side effects.

Top 10 Unhealthy Side Effects of the War on Drugs

10. Limits on Pharmaceutical Development
9. Inappropriate Use of Legal Drugs
8. Abusive and Ineffective Addiction Treatment
7. Violence
6. Crack and Crystal Meth
5. The Pain Epidemic
4. The Overdose Epidemic
3. The AIDS Epidemic
2. The Incarceration Epidemic
1. Racist Enforcement Policies

---