Chronic City: Onward Through The Fog -- Marijuana And Health
By Steve Elliott, Monday, May. 18 2009 @ 9:30AM
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent call for a debate on legalizing marijuana in California (as a means to increase state tax revenue) has re-ignited the long-running controversy around pot's effects on health. Predictably, both sides are waving the studies which support their positions, and major media outlets are looking for some reasonable middle ground.
The debate was pushed further into the limelight by yesterday's Sacramento Bee article which attempts to give a balanced view of the conflicting studies on the issue. And while there undeniably are many studies on both sides of the marijuana divide, it's important to not let an even-handed attempt at fairness obscure some very obvious conclusions which can be inferred from the results so far.
First of all, it is not true that "we don't know much about marijuana." Since the late 1960s, marijuana has been one of the most heavily studied substances in human history -- and there is a distinct lack of any "silver bullet" finding which could conceivably justify the herb being illegal.
Political agendas abound, of course, in a polarizing issue like
marijuana legalization. Studies funded by government agencies like the
National Institutes on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Office of National
Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) tend to look for deleterious effects to
justify current policy, while studies funded by liberal think tanks and
the marijuana lobby (and, to be honest, some independent studies, too)
tend to conclude that marijuana's dangers have been grossly overstated.
I've
personally talked to scientists who have told me that government
research grants are a hell of lot easier to obtain if, in the research
proposal, you specifically say you are researching the harm done by
cannabis, rather than saying you are researching whether cannabis does
harm.
Such linguistic intricacies aside, even
the ONDCP has occasionally allowed flashes of real research to make it
through the cracks of official propaganda. In 1999, after the ONDCP
asked the Institute of Medicine to review the available evidence, the
Institute concluded that "except for the harms associated with smoking,
the adverse effects of marijuana use are within the range of effects
tolerated for other medications."
Former
Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders went further in 2004. Elders, renowned
for her plain-spoken forthrightness, wrote, "The evidence is
overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea,
vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple
sclerosis, cancer and AIDS -- or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to
treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana
is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every
day."
UCLA pulmonologist Dr. Donald Tashkin
studied -- for three decades -- marijuana's effects on the lungs.
Tashkin studied heavy marijuana smokers, expecting to find that they
had an increased risk of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease (COPD). "What we found instead was no association and even the
suggestion of some protective effect," Taskin told the press. His
study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was the largest
case-control study ever conducted.
Even while
studies such as Tashkin's indicate the dangers of smoking marijuana may
have been overstated, another crucial fact often overlooked in the heat
of debate is that many marijuana users, especially medical users, don't
smoke pot. Medical cannabis users often either eat the herb cooked into
various dishes, or use vaporizers, which heat herbal material enough so
that active ingredients can be inhaled without the harmful effects of
smoke.
As the debate on marijuana's health
dangers (or lack thereof) continues to heat up, remembering these two
things can help you keep perspective:
(1) Ask
who is funding the research, and what is their agenda. The motive may
be attempting to justify current repressive laws against cannabis.
(2)
Studies and researchers insisting that smoking marijuana is the
only possible way of ingesting the drug are to be approached with
caution.
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