What’s the worst movie ever made? Let me put in a plug for the 1936 flick Reefer Madness. Disguised as a movie with a plot, this was actually a propaganda film intended to highlight the evils of marijuana smoking. “Women Cry for It, Men Die for It,” screamed the promotional posters. Moviegoers would witness “drug-crazed abandon and the soul-destroying effects of killer marijuana.” The movie delivers some of the worst acting you’ll ever see, along with exaggerated allegations about the effects of smoking marijuana. The thin plot focuses on a pair of upstanding teenagers who fall into the clutches of a dastardly gang bent on converting them into marijuana addicts. It takes only one joint to get the kids hooked, and after that, it’s a straight descent into hell. Along the way, there’s illicit sex, hallucinations, murder, suicide, and ghastly dialogue. If marijuana makes people talk like that, it is a dangerous substance indeed.
The 1930s featured some of the strongest anti-drug rhetoric in history. Government pamphlets warned teenagers about friendly strangers who might put the killer drug marijuana in their coffee, and described how insanity and death lurked in this “narcotic.” You could “grow enough marijuana in a window box to drive the whole population of the United States, stark, staring, raving mad,” declared an article in the widely circulated Hearst newspapers. The writer went on to ask the rhetorical question, “heroin, cocaine, morphine, marijuana, opium—what does it matter which it is? One horror is no worse than another.” It didn’t seem to matter that there was absolutely no evidence to back up these preposterous claims. Marijuana was a perfect scapegoat to explain increasing crime rates. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics claimed that marijuana caused crimes of violence and led to insanity and heroin addiction.
The anti-marijuana movement had strong racial overtones. Mexican and black workers in the southern us often took solace in marijuana smoking, and suffered severely at the hands of the white narcotics police. Even the medical establishment supported the racism. A 1931 issue of the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal stated that “The dominant race (meaning whites) and most enlightened countries are alcoholic, whilst the races and nations addicted to hemp and opium, some of which once attained great heights of culture and civilization, have deteriorated both mentally and physically.” Such absurd statements totally ignored the scientific evidence that was already available at the time.
Thirty years earlier, the British government had established the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission to answer questions about the use of marijuana in India, then under British rule. The expert committee interviewed almost 2,000 witnesses, made field trips to thirty cities, and published a thorough seven-volume report. It concluded that small doses of hemp were beneficial, and that moderate use of cannabis had no significant injurious mental, physical, or moral effect. Furthermore, even abuse of cannabis was less harmful than the abuse of alcohol. The commission recommended a system of licensing and revenue taxation for the sale of cannabis and suggested that overly restrictive marijuana laws would drive people to more dangerous drugs like alcohol and opium.
The Indian Hemp Commission report was a thoroughly researched, levelheaded account of marijuana use. It was totally ignored in the us because it did not fit the political ideology of the times. It was far more suitable for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to paint a picture of marijuana as a ghastly and dangerous substance in order to push for the establishment of “narcotics farms for the confinement and treatment of persons addicted to Indian Hemp.”
The vestiges of that era are still with us. Some right-wing fringe groups attribute the moral decay of our society to marijuana use. Smoking pot damages the brain, they argue. It leads to harder drugs. Pro-marijuana groups have fought back, starting with the beatniks of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. Smoking pot is not only pleasurable and innocuous, they claim, but it also has decided health benefits. It should be legalized.
What do the scientific facts say? Marijuana does not destroy the brain, but heavy, daily use may lead to slight memory impairment. A well-controlled study carried out at Harvard University examined sixty-five heavy users and found that, when compared to light users, they had a slightly harder time with some card-sorting experiments. Marijuana does impair dexterity and visual skills and therefore affects driving, but does not make people drive recklessly, as alcohol does. Nor is there evidence that it leads to the use of harder drugs. In fact, in Holland, where it has been legal to purchase marijuana in coffee shops since 1976, there is an amazingly low rate of heroin addiction. While more Dutch teenagers try marijuana, fewer go on to be regular users than in the us.
Obviously, marijuana smoking is not good for the lungs. These organs were designed to breathe clean air. Studies have shown that three to four joints is roughly equivalent to twenty cigarettes in tar content, mostly because of the lack of filters and the tendency of pot smokers to hold the smoke in their lungs for a longer time. Unlike tobacco cigarettes, however, marijuana does not lead to blocked airways or emphysema. Chronic bronchitis, though, is a possibility. Marijuana has been found to have estrogenic effects, and according to some, it may play a role in the reduction of sperm counts. There is evidence that constant marijuana use leads to a generalized lack of motivation to pursue studies or a career. In some cases, smoking pot can cause anxiety and panic. All of which are good reasons to be extremely wary of marijuana use.
On the other side of the ledger, marijuana has been hailed as an effective way to control the nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy. Controlled trials have shown that it is indeed effective. Its main ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, has been available in a purified drug form, under the name dronabinol, since 1985, but has not seen wide use. Proponents of marijuana smoking claim that inhalation of the smoke is far more effective than taking the pill form. Indeed, they could be right, as the liver tends to metabolize the oral medication quickly. But today, other very effective anti-nausea medications are available.
There is also evidence that smoking marijuana may have some anticonvulsive effects, such as in the treatment of epilepsy. In a celebrated legal case in Toronto, Terry Parker was acquitted of charges of possession of marijuana when he convinced the judge that he was growing the plants for his own use. His epilepsy, he claimed, was better controlled than with the usual prescription drugs. There is also evidence that marijuana can ease the pain of multiple sclerosis, and that it may even have an effect in controlling the spasticity sometimes associated with the disease. Based on controlled trials, Canada has approved an oral spray form of marijuana (Sativex) for the relief of symptoms associated with multiple sclerosis.
Marijuana has also been used for the treatment of glaucoma. Until 1991, some patients were actually given prescriptions for joints to reduce the pressure in their eyes. The availability of better medications has made this approach unnecessary, although there have been cases in which patients responded better to cannabis than to other drugs. The appetite stimulant effect of marijuana may be useful in the wasting often seen in AIDS patients, but pure dronabinol is as effective as smoking. Obviously, marijuana is not a miracle drug. But nor is it a “killer weed.”
The World Health Organization actually concluded that marijuana is safer than alcohol or tobacco, but its report was suppressed when officials from the us National Institute of Drug Abuse objected to the findings. This in spite of the fact that both the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, perhaps the two top medical publications in the world, recently published editorials favoring the liberalization of marijuana laws. Oh, yes, the marijuana issue is still very politicized. Lee Brown, who headed the us Office for National Drug Control Policy under President Clinton, once returned from the Netherlands and offered this remarkable view of the Dutch situation: “I’ve visited their parks. Their children walk around like zombies.” Shades of Reefer Madness. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.