Jim Anthony, Chair of Epidemiology at Michigan State University, recently released results from an ongoing study:
Toward a Global View of Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis and Cocaine Use: Findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys. Sarah Lynch discusses the study - and its 'expert' critics - for Time Magazine, in
An American Pastime: Smoking Pot. Far and above the rates discovered in other societies, the rate at which Americans try marijuana and cocaine is staggering - often (much) more than twice rates found in other countries. The study's authors sum it up in the conclusion: "drug use is related to income, but does not appear to be simply related to drug policy, since
countries with more stringent policies towards illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies."
It's funny how the authors of the peer-reviewed study are referred to as 'researchers' and the spokesman for the US Office of National Drug Control Policy as 'experts.'
Lynch reports that 'experts' criticize the study for only looking at lifetime incidence, not habitual drug use. ONDCP spokesman Tom Riley (aka the 'experts') is quoted as saying, "for drug policy, what you look at is regular use."
Oh, ok. Well, let's have a look at regular drug use, shall we? Let's consider: maybe the 42% of Americans who have tried marijuana (in contrast to the 20% of Dutch folks) really were just experimenting, and the draconian, racist drug policies enforced by our government have cut the rates of habitual pot smoking far below those found in, say, a country such as the Netherlands, where regulation and harm reduction prevail in the struggle for sensible drug policy. What does the
2008 World Drug Report say? Well ... maybe these researchers, too, were unfair. They published a chart, for Cannabis, showing Annual Prevalence of Abuse (let's not get into whether that's even possible in regards to pot), and the United States, at 12.2% of the population aged 15-64, is again more than twice the Netherlands (at 5.4%).
Maybe it's time to stop looking to government spokespeople as experts, and - at the very least - listen to scientists who spend their entire careers researching drug use and public health. Dr. Anthony also commented in Lynch's article. In light of this research, he questions, "whether Americans will want to continue supporting the incarceration of young people who use small amounts of marijuana." I, for one, do not. Do you?
Posted by Vera Leone