Why the Insanity about Marijuana and Drug Use?

Robert Volkmann, MD

Our national policy on drug use in general, and on marijuana use specifically, is simple insanity. This is an inescapable conclusion drawn from my nearly 20 years as a practicing physician and from observing our nation’s policies in action.

Every day I see people who either struggle with or are resigned to cigarette and/or alcohol addiction that is legal and socially “normal.” Some of my patients use drugs of the illegal variety, including marijuana, heroin and Methamphetamine.

As a practicing physician, I deal with substance use/abuse. I focus most of my efforts on smoking cessation but alcoholism is also serious. I have only disgust for methamphetamine. I tell my patients who use it that I liken it to crank case oil. I don’t see much cocaine abuse because it tends to be more an issue for a wealthier group than my clientele. I have seen patients on heroin and observed how highly addictive it is. I have also witnessed the limited effectiveness of the methadone maintenance programs.

Interestingly, in the Netherlands and Switzerland (of all places), heroin has been legalized to a limited degree. While heroin can be very addictive, when it is legalized and the addicts have access to clean needles and uncontaminated sources of the heroin, they are able to lead very normal lives. They can raise families, hold jobs, and do not have physical complications. This makes it, paradoxically, a safer drug than either alcohol or cigarettes. Heroin is safer medically than either cocaine or methamphetamine however; they are like cigarettes, not really medically safe at any level of use.

Additionally, I have virtually no concern for marijuana use except for the rare individual who smokes it all of the time. (A pothead is very much like a binge drinker, and there is always a problem with bingeing.) I usually tell my pot-smoking patients to work to change the law that criminalizes its use. When people ask me about marijuana being a “gateway drug,” I remind them that it is cigarettes and alcohol that constitute the true gateway drugs, as they are far more addictive in their nature than marijuana.

Cigarettes have similar withdrawal features as methamphetamine, heroin and heavy alcohol use. I have not yet encountered a marijuana withdrawal syndrome and I seriously doubt that it even exists in any important way. If it does, I have not had to deal with it medically, as I have with the hard drugs, alcohol, methamphetamine, cigarettes and heroin.

Let’s begin with the rational, non-controversial baseline assumption that a drug is a drug, whether legal or not. Tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamine are all drugs with psychological and physiological effects in the body. From this, we can compare effects and come to conclusions.

Why do I think the criminalization of marijuana is crazy? There are NO REPORTED DEATHS from marijuana use…ever.

Now compare this statistic to the competition. I have personally seen patients of mine dying from cigarettes since the time I was a medical student. Nationally, some 440,000 die every year from cigarette use, with an estimated 10,000,000 expected to die annually by the year 2030 (according to The Lancet in its recent July 13th issue). All deaths combined from heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are a small fraction of those caused by cigarettes. Not only are cigarettes legal but also the farming of tobacco has been subsidized by our government’s farm policy for decades.

In addition, smokers’ health care costs run into the billions of dollars, and health consequences from tobacco’s non-lethal effects hurt uncounted others, including millions of non-smokers as a result of second-hand smoke.

Alcohol is the same story, though the numbers aren’t as high as with tobacco. Tens of thousands die every year from car and work accidents related to its addictive consumption of alcohol. In addition, alcohol abuse is incredibly destructive to marriages and families. In my own family, I have seen alcohol kill. And I have seen it destroy lives of friends. I trained in VA hospitals and the wards were crowded with those suffering from the medical complications of alcohol.

The death toll from World War II continues to rise as a direct result of the military policy of giving cigarettes to soldiers entering combat creating an entire generation of men addicted to cigarettes. Many of these men are currently dying from an addiction unwittingly sponsored by our own government.

Given the known dangers and the costs to society, should we criminalize the use of tobacco and alcohol, as we do some of the other drugs? Hell No!!

The “moral crusade” of alcohol prohibition during the 1920’s & 30’s proved the folly of that course of action and was rightfully repealed, but not before crime syndicates, like the Mafia, reaped enormous profits when alcohol was pushed underground.

It is plain and simple; prohibition does not work. It didn’t work for alcohol in the 1920’s and 30’s, and it doesn’t work for other drugs today. It is the wrong way to deal with problems of personal choice and substance use.

While these substances, legal and illegal, can be quite addictive and dangerous, we must consider the social costs of prohibition: pain and suffering, ruined lives, neighborhood crime, billions of dollars spent making and the distributing products or trying to dissuade its use, police work, judicial and prison intrusions, etc. The distinction between legal and illegal may seem an irrelevant distinction, because all of these substances have similar social costs. But the distinction is not irrelevant. Strange as it may seem, the illegality itself becomes one of the hardest things to deal with when it comes to “hard” drugs.

As a physician, I work very hard to help people stop smoking and abstain from excessive alcohol and the use of illegal drugs—methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine.

My efforts to promote health are hampered by the drugs’ illegal classification. Imagine what a nightmare it would be to confront and deal with alcohol and smoking addiction if they, too, were illegal. Look how hard it is to deal with them as they are. With the illegal drugs, this nightmare has become a day job for millions of people worldwide and for our society in general. This nightmare is part of my job as a physician dealing with public health issues.

And then there is marijuana. Marijuana is illegal, with billions being spent as part of a War On Drugs against its use, although there are NO REPORTED DEATHS from its use. I have not seen a family destroyed by use of marijuana. Yet I have seen many families hurt by the legal action taken against those who use it. There is virtually no medical basis for even scolding people about its use, except when they are bingeing on it.

Marijuana is medicine. When used correctly, it is highly effective for palliative applications effects on chronic disabling pain, muscle spasms of multiple sclerosis, nausea prevention, and such. It is recently reported that endogenous cannabis-like compounds, “endocannabinoids,” have been found in the human central nervous system (July 24th publication of The Lancet, page 315). These are similar in nature to the naturally occurring opiate-like compounds known as “endorphins” that have receptor sites in the human brain. The development of a whole range of medicines came out of this earlier discovery, including heroin, Valium and other drugs. Doctors throughout the world use these routinely for pain mitigation. We know that marijuana, like heroin, mimics an endogenous neurotransmitter in our brains, which is a fancy way of saying that we can now pursue research that will inevitably open a whole new field in medical knowledge and therapeutics. It certainly lends credence to the use of marijuana medicinally. Marijuana as medicine is real and not simply fictitious, as the federal government currently asserts.

The war on drugs is folly on a number of accounts. Medically, it simply makes my work as a doctor that much more difficult. As with the prohibition of alcohol, our criminalizing of any of these drugs, which can certainly be understood from the harm that can come from their abuse, has simply been ineffective. It has not worked. It is a failed policy. As legal scholars would affirm, the propagation of failed, unenforceable laws has the detrimental effect of destroying respect for the law. In a nation where we operate under the Rule of Law, this degrading effect is very significant, undermining the very foundations of this Republic. 

The economic consequences of the criminalization of these drugs go beyond the high cost of the foolish policy of sending addicts to prison, of high court costs, of the diversion of law enforcement resources. They include the very large costs to business of the huge amount of property crime that comes from this criminalization. Just as with prohibition, whole new criminal organizations are being bred and financed by the huge underground economy of the drug world. These criminal organizations and the street gangs associated with them are a scourge in our society, worse perhaps than the Mafia ever was.

In addition, many of these people’s drug habits are supported by property crime, such as shoplifting, car theft and identity theft. The cost to businesses of our failed drug policy runs into the tens of billions of dollars every year, a hemorrhage to our economy. It is simply VERY BAD BUSINESS. It has been estimated that up to 80% of property crime is drug related, all brought on by our policy of Criminalizing drug use.

We must deprive these criminal organizations of their economic base. To do otherwise is folly.

Not only is the criminalization of marijuana political folly and social insanity, it turns out that it is also medically inappropriate. It makes absolutely no sense to wage a war against its use, throwing millions into our overcrowded prisons for a street drug that causes no reported deaths and may even be medically useful, while at the same time allowing tobacco to be totally legal and advertised in our media to our youth (though the offending corporations pretend that they don’t).

Our nation’s drug policy is economic folly. Not only are there huge business costs associated with drug use being criminalized, there is the considerable cost to tax payer dollars to house these people in our over crowded jails and prisons at a cost estimated at $80,000 per inmate year, the cost of our judicial system and law enforcement. So much of this is at the expense of money better spent in higher education, health care and social services that we have no money for at this time. We can ill afford to waste huge sums of money on a public policy that has not only failed to alleviate the drug problem, but has actually compounded it.

We are an addictive culture, as witness to our addictions to TV – see “Television Addiction” in the February issue of Scientific American, page 74-80 – computer gaming, gambling and even sugar (try stopping sometime!). The prohibition and the criminalization of our addictions is neither an effective way of dealing with this very real problem nor a wise social policy. The criminalization of drugs, especially that of marijuana, is Bad Medicine, is Bad Law, is Bad Business and is moral hypocrisy at its worst. This has to stop. The prohibition of alcohol was a failed social experiment with terrible costs to our society that plague us yet. The continued criminalization of drugs is an unwitting and foolish continuation of that mistake. How long will we fail to recognize that and fail to correct this mistake that is hurting so many of our people at such great expense to everyone? As a nation we can live and act with much more intelligence than this. It is time to act to change these very destructive laws, changes already being pioneered in Europe.

It is time those of us in the medical profession and in positions of authority to speak up on this matter.

Reference:

Volkmann, R. (2004, Fall Issue, 31) Political Insanity about Marijuanna and Drug Use. Alternatives for Cultural Creativity Magazine.

Robert Volkmann, MD, is an alternative physician and surgeon in private practice in Salem, Oregon. He is a transpersonal counselor often working with his clients’ nighttime dreams, natal astrology as well as the use of Tarot cards to facilitate insightful information from their unconscious mind. He may be reached by e-mail at rvolk@navicom.com