You can also read my previous commentary on the subject, "The Feds Are Addicted to Pot -- Even If You Aren't," available from Alternet.org here.]

Nearly six out of ten people admitted to drug ‘treatment’ for marijuana are referred there by the criminal justice system, according to a just-released report by the US Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA).

In 2008, 57 percent of persons referred to treatment for marijuana as their ‘primary substance of abuse,’ were referred by the criminal justice system. For adolescents, nearly half (48 percent) were referred via the criminal justice system.

By contrast, criminal justice referrals accounted for just 37 percent of the overall total of drug treatment admissions in 2008.

“Primary marijuana admissions were less likely than all admissions combined to be self-referred to treatment,” the study found.

Since 1998 the percentage of individuals in drug treatment primarily for marijuana has risen approximately 25 percent, the report found. This increase is being primarily driven by a proportional rise in the percentage of criminal justice referrals. According to a previous federal study, the proportion of marijuana treatment admissions from all sources other than the criminal justice system has been declining since the mid-1990s.

Commenting on the study, NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said: “These statistics make it clear that it is not marijuana use per se that is driving these treatment admission rates; it is marijuana prohibition that is primarily responsible. These people for the most part are not ‘addicts’ in any true sense of the word. Rather, they are ordinary Americans who have experienced the misfortune of being busted for marijuana who are forced to choose between rehab or jail.”

According to federal figures compiled by SAMHSA in 2009, some 37 percent of the estimated 288,000 thousand people who entered drug treatment for cannabis in 2007 had not reported using it in the 30 days previous to their admission. Another 16 percent of those admitted said that they’d used marijuana three times or fewer in the month prior to their admission.

Full text of the report, “Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) 1998-2008: National Admissions to Substance Abuse Treatment Services,” is available online here.

Clinical evidence indicating that marijuana use may be casually linked to incidences of schizophrenia or other psychological harms is not compelling, according to a scientific review published online by the journal Addiction.

Investigators at the University of Bristol, Department of Social Medicine assessed the potential health risks of cannabis, particularly whether use of the drug may be causally linked with mental illness.

Authors wrote: “We continue to take the view that the evidence that cannabis use causes schizophrenia is neither very new, nor by normal criteria, particularly compelling. … For example, our recent modeling suggests that we would need to prevent between 3000 and 5000 cases of heavy cannabis use among young men and women to prevent one case of schizophrenia, and that four or five times more young people would need to avoid light cannabis use to prevent a single schizophrenia case. … We conclude that the strongest evidence of a possible causal relation between cannabis use and schizophrenia emerged more than 20 years ago and that the strength of more recent evidence may have been overstated.”

In 2007, an analysis in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that experimenting with marijuana could increase one’s risk of developing a psychotic illness later in life by some 40 percent. Following this report, Parliament in 2008 voted to reclassify marijuana as a Class B substance, making its possession punishable by up to five years in prison.

University of Bristol researchers also criticized Parliament’s reclassification of the drug, which took effect earlier this year. They concluded: “The only important possible benefit of prohibition is prevention of cannabis use. There is little or no evidence that it effectively achieves this benefit. Patterns of cannabis use in the population appear to be independent of the policy surrounding use, and criminalizing individual cannabis users does not appear to modify their use in a healthy way.”

Overall, investigators determined that marijuana’s most significant health risk was its association and reinforcement with tobacco smoking.

“Cannabis-related disorders (CRDs), including cannabis abuse or dependence and cannabis induced disorders … are a major public health issue. … Nearly one million people are seeking treatment for marijuana dependence every year and sufficient research has been carried out to confirm that the use of cannabis can produce serious physical and psychological consequences.

“Currently, there are no medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of CRDs. Given the extent of the use of cannabis in the general population, and the medical and psychological consequences of its use … there is a great public health need to develop safe and effective therapeutic interventions. The need to develop treatments targeting adolescents and young adults is particularly relevant in view of their disproportionate use patterns.”

In other words, the federal government is spending millions upon millions of your dollars to solicit research to find a supposed ‘cure’ for alleged ‘marijuana addiction‘ — at the same time that it is spending virtually no money on clinical trials to assess the medical value of cannabis itself.

I try my best to cut through the BS (“One million people are seeking treatment?!” Um, more like 287,933 — and six out of ten of them were referred by the criminal justice system following an arrest.) in my latest Alternet essay, “The Feds Are Addicted to Pot — Even If You Aren’t,” which you can read and comment on here.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Feds Are Addicted to Pot — Even If You Aren’t
via Alternet

Marijuana’s addiction potential may be no big deal, but it’s certainly big business.

According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of “drug dependence” (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for “drug dependence.”

Nevertheless, it is pot — not booze or cigarettes — that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green.

Read the entire article here.

This is made clear in a candid interview with Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Deputy Director Tom McLellan in the November 15 edition of The New Republic’s webpage. In a blunt and critical tone, McLellan is interviewed by University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack for an informative TNR series entitled The Treatment.

While reasonable people can reasonably differ, what personally vexes me is that Mr. McLellan, a longtime veteran of government-provided addiction treatment services (mainly at the Veterans Administration for an astounding 27 years), clearly has an immense compassion, sense of service and commitment to helping his fellow humans who’ve become addicted to drugs find a path back to sobriety and functionality, which is a professional field of public health that I respect immensely. However, I’m terribly disappointed by what appears to be Mr. McLellan’s political tin ear on the subject of cannabis law reform–notably his disdain for patients having legal access to medical cannabis.

I commend NORML supporters to read the entire Treatment interview, below is the applicable excerpt where cannabis is discussed:

Marijuana use, medical and otherwise

Pollack: …. California does a medical marijuana ballot initiative, to take a random example. States do things that are contrary to the general tenure of the policy of this office and maybe to federal policy at large. Attorney General Holder has basically said: “California has made a decision. We’ve got scarce resources, and we’re not going to get in the way of that.”… How do you negotiate that federal/state set of issues?

McLellan: A very tough question. I’m still very new at this. And I don’t speak entirely for the office, so I’ll give you my personal reactions. In the narrow scope of things, the idea of being judicious about the use of your federal prosecutorial resources is first of all the Attorney General’s call and second of all probably smart. You’ve got a rapist and a marijuana user. Who are you going to go after? OK.

But, I’m disappointed that it was done with such drama, and that ONDCP and DoJ did not better-coordinate the policy’s release and answer questions about it side by side. For the first 3 or 4 days, the policy was spun in the media as a stalking horse for legalization and political activists claimed it meant all these things that it didn’t. That happened in part because we didn’t have a clear, coordinated message across the government. This  administration, certainly including ONDCP and the Department of Justice, opposes marijuana legalization and believes that it’s worth it to try to reduce availability of marijuana. Normally we work well together on that and a bunch of other issues. We just didn’t work very well together on this one, in my opinion.

The issue of marijuana has been interestingly framed by legalization activists. It’s been framed as, “Marijuana’s not bad for you. In fact, it’s really medically good for certain people.” That was extremely cleverly done, because we could debate that all day long with existing evidence. How bad is marijuana? Is it as bad as alcohol? Does it even have some medical benefits for people that have nausea or glaucoma and all that?

Well, that’s not what’s at issue. What’s at issue is: there are efforts being made to increase the availability, and thus the use, the penetration if you will, of marijuana use. In order to show that availability expansion efforts are sensible and that we should reverse policies and laws and everything else, it seems to me the argument to be proven is, “It’s good for you.” That should be the standard, rather than “Marijuana’s not that bad.” Name for me another substance that you would say, “It’s not that bad, so let’s reverse state laws. Let’s increase availability to a product that really is targeted to young people.” For that, you should have to prove that it’s genuinely good, not just “not that bad”.

And our position is very simple on this, and I think, frankly, you can’t refute it. Marijuana is not good for you. You have to get that one exactly right. I didn’t say, “Marijuana’s not that bad.“ I said, “Marijuana’s not good for you.” And more people using marijuana is not good for society. And I believe these to be facts, by the way….

It is possible to reduce availability, not eliminate, but reduce availability. It’s already been done. It is possible to prevent abuse of marijuana, and it’s possible treat marijuana and other drug addictions. If you do those things, you have a better socially functioning society.

The other artful thing that’s been done by advocates about marijuana is that it has been pitched on one side of the base, “You know, marijuana’s not that bad for you. OK? And by the way, the only alternative to legalization is mass incarceration, which is really bad and it’s really expensive and all that.”

It’s a beautifully crafted, misleading argument. Our argument’s entirely different. Nobody wants mass incarceration of marijuana users. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph–what a waste of money that is. But, marijuana’s not good for you. So we need policies that keep marijuana illegal, are sensible, and that reduce availability and use of marijuana. And those policies–unlike the current legalize and tax proposals being floated –could generate revenue for the public. A city or state could generate a lot of revenue through fines for marijuana users.

Pollack: In my own public health work, I don’t really do that much with marijuana. It’s striking to me that marijuana is such a touchstone of drug policy debate.

McLellan: It’s the center of the universe. Yeah (laughs). With all the really serious problems that we’ve got facing us–prescription drug use probably among the top, and you know, name the other drugs, why we’re spending this time on this nonsense about medical marijuana and legalization. It’s the damnest thing to me. I can’t get over it. It’s almost as though there were a contingent of people out there really eager to keep it at the front of the newspapers. Well, it isn’t us. We don’t want it there.

Pollack: There’s a culture war in which marijuana is one of the key fronts.

McLellan: People make a living debating this on stage. You know? That’s hard for me to believe, that there’s a living to be made going around debating about marijuana’s benefits and why you ought to legalize drugs and crap like that. It’s just like a silly discussion to me.

Well….A few personal observations:

-Mr. McLellan certainly is ‘old school’ when it comes to endorsing the existing drug war dynamic that when his fellow citizens use illegal drugs to ‘save’ them they are best arrested and drawn into the criminal justice system;

-Like his predecessors at ONDCP, notably former drug czars McCaffrey and Walters, McLellan mocks medical cannabis and the public’s mass acceptance of it as one of the choices that a physician and patient can employ as a safe, non-toxic medicine;

-Mr. McLellan claims that the current administration does not want to necessarily incarcerate cannabis consumers en mass (how charitable!);

-Mr. McLellan appears genuinely amazed if not chagrined that there are citizens who exist that disagree with the prohibition of cannabis; that there are actual organizations of citizen-stakeholders advocating for alternatives to the self-evidently failed status quo of cannabis prohibition, complaining that some ‘make a career’ of advocating for obviously needed policy changes.

I suggest Mr. McLellan pause for a moment, look around his ONDCP office, and fully realize that he, and tens or thousands of anti-drug bureaucrats and law enforcement personnel employed by the federal government (ie, ONDCP, DEA, NIDA, Customs, TSA, Border Patrols, VA, SAMSHA, NDIC, EPIC; and hundreds of government organs funded by the taxpayers, like CADCA, NFIA and Partnership for a Drug-Free America) are careerists as well….However, unlike reformers, who employ privately donated dollars (maybe $15-$20 million donated in total to all drug policy reform groups annually), Mr. McLellan and his other career prohibitionists employ tens of billions annually of taxpayer’s money.

Calling the kettle black does not get one far in Washington, DC.

-Maybe most disturbing, and a notion I’ve never heard advanced before by any drug policy official or law enforcement representative, Mr. McLellan believes that there is to be more revenue collected by arresting nearly a million cannabis consumers a year than by actually taxing the commercial cultivation, sales and consumption of cannabis (and of course the windfall enjoyed by society when billions of taxpayer dollars are no longer wasted annually trying to enforce a clearly unenforceable prohibition via mass arrests, prosecutions, incarcerations and probation services).

NORML supporters and cannabis law reform advocates in general need to realize that while there is a discernible cannabis law reform zeitgeist these days to be sure, unfortunately, existing at the top of government management charts, are government employees who are still very resistant to any real degree of cannabis law reform, and who favor arresting cannabis consumers en mass rather than taxing them like the consumers of alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical products.

Ugh.

Having spent over a decade debunking the ‘potent pot myth‘ — the false yet wildly popular notion that today’s cannabis is dramatically more potent, and thus more dangerous (or as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown likes to say, “more lethal“) than the marijuana of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it’s nice to finally get some back up.

Writing in the forthcoming issue of the scientific journal Addiction, researchers at the University of New South Wales, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, examined the potency of over 100,000 pot seizures from around the word. They concluded (drum roll please), “Claims made in the public domain about a 20- or 30-fold increase in cannabis potency and about the adverse mental health effects of cannabis contamination are not supported currently by the evidence.”

The investigators also addressed the equally popular myth that ‘potent pot’ is responsible for an increase in the number of people seeking ‘treatment’ for cannabis, finding, “Another reason for increase in treatment seeking could be the introduction of cannabis diversion programmes, some of which involve mandatory treatment for those who have committed a cannabis-related offense” — a point we’ve made here on several occasions.

Want more details? NORML podcaster extraordinaire Russ Belville has an extensive summary of the study here.

Fortunately, more rational minds know differently. Most recently, a Canadian research team took the time to actually interview various cannabis consumers. Their findings appear in the current issue of the journal Substance Use and Misuse, and provide a telling, albeit predictable, look into the motivations of the ‘typical’ marijuana user.

Why do tens of millions of adults all over the world smoke pot?

In short, because they enjoy it!

Understanding the Motivations for Recreational Marijuana Use Among Adult Canadians

Substance Use & Misuse, Vol. 43, Issue 3 & 4, February 2008: pages 539-572

The primary purpose of this study was to develop a better understanding of what motivates a selected group of adult[s] to use marijuana and to explore the social contexts in which it is used. …. Using interviews to gain insight into the subjective experiences of the participants, this research corroborated the results of previous studies that found that most adult marijuana users regulate use to their recreational time and do not use compulsively. Rather, their use is purposively intended to enhance their leisure activities and manage the challenges and demands of living in contemporary modern society. Generally, participants reported using marijuana because it enhanced relaxation and concentration, making a broad range of leisure activities more enjoyable and pleasurable.