From: Christopher B Reeve <[cr 39] at [andrew.cmu.edu]>
Organization: Sophomore, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon,
Pittsburgh, PA

"In 1962 the White House Conference on Narcotic and Drug Abuse
stated: 'It is the opinion of the Panel that the hazards of
marihuana per se have been exaggerated and that long criminal
sentences imposed on an occasional user or possessor of the drug
are in poor social perspective.  Although marijuana has long
held the reputation of inciting individuals to commit sexual
offenses and other antisocial acts, the evidence is inadequate
to substantiate this.'" ("Proceedings: White House Conference on
Narcotic and Drug Abuse, September 27 - 28, 1962," State
Department Auditorium, Washington, D.C. (Washington, G.P.O.,
1963), 286, extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana
Reconsidered, 310)

"the term 'drug abuse' apparently does not necessarily require
that the drug have demonstrable ill effects.  In the Moslem,
Eastern Mediterranean region during the seventeenth century,
coffee drinking was strictly forbidden, and those who owned or
even visited coffee houses faced the death penalty.  The
severity of this punishment had nothing to do with the rhetoric
about the deleterious effects of coffee, but rather with the
cofee house becoming a meeting place for political malcotents
assumed to be plotting against established religious and
political authorities." (T. Eli Mahi, "A Preliminary Study on
Khat Together with the Institutional History of Coffee as a
Beverage in Relation to Khat," World Health Organization
Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, March 1962,
extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana Reconsidered, 338)

"When from 1956-1960 the cultivation of Cannabis sativa was
prohibited in Tunisia and Algeria, vineyards replaced hemp
fields, and alcohol consumption took the place of cannabis with
no consequent improvement in public health.  B. W. Sigg believes
this demonstrates that where large segments of the population
are in the habit of using nonaddictive euphoriants, repressive
control is futile." (R. H. Blum and associates, "Drugs,
Behavior, and Crime," Society and Drugs: Social and Cultural
Observations (San Francisco, 1969), I, p. 74, citing: B. W.
Sigg, Le Cannabisme chronique: Fruit du sous developpement et du
capitalisme (Marrakesch, 1960; Algiers, 1963).  All of this is
extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana Reconsidered, 344 -
345)

"In Japan, after World War II, amphetamines became freely and
legally available.  Their use began to skyrocket to the point
where it was estimated that five million Japanese were habitual
users.  In response to this medicosocio emergency, a highly
punitive law was enacted in 1953 against both users and sellers.
 But whereas the amphetamine problem was considered solved by
1955, the number of narcotic addicts had begun to rise
steadilyl.  The increase in the use of narcotics became so
alarming that in 1963 a new law, intended to be as severe as the
1953 amphetamine legislation, was passed.  It solved the heroin
problem, but the number of barbituate users now began to rise,
and in fact is still rising.  In addition there is now a sharp
increase inthe practice of solvent inhalation" (L. E. Hollister,
"Criminal Laws and the Control of Drugs of Abuse: An Historical
View of the Law (Or, It's the Lawyer's Fault)," Journal of
Clinical Pharmacology and Journal of New Drugs (1969), pp.
345-348, extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana
Reconsidered, 346)

"The possibility that the economic impact of drug abuse of all
kinds may be overestimated is supported by the White House
Committee on Narcotic and Drug Abuse, which has noted that if
the economic aspects alone are considered, there are many other
problems deserving a higher priority." (Proceedings of the White
House Conference on Narcotic and Drug Abuse (Washington, G.P.O.,
1962), extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana Reconsidered,
347)

"Roughly three-quarters of those arrested for marihuana
violations have had only minor or no difficulty with the law
previously.  Of those arrested for possession of marihuana in
California, about one-third are incarcerated for some period of
time.  It is an unfortunate fact that most of the jails and
prisons in this country are chronically overcrowded and
understaffed.  To send a personn whose behavior presents no
essential threat to the fabric of society to such a place is
absurd.  Worse, it throws someone whose only 'crime' may be that
he has smoked marihuana into the closest contact with a number
of much more serious (from the point of view of the threat of
direct social harm) offenders, and increases the likelihood that
he will engage in other, perhaps non-drug-related criminal
activities, after he is released: the criminogenic nature of the
penalties provided by the antimarihuana laws also includes the
effects on users of imprisonment.  But even those who are not
imprisoned have their futures seriously scarred inasmuch sa
their arrest records follow them through life and jeopardize
their chances of getting jobs, gaining entrance to schools, or
being accepted as members in many organizations." (N. L. Chayet,
"Legal Aspects of Drug Abuse," In Drugs and Youth, ed.
Wittenborn et al., p 241, extracted from Lester Grinspoon,
Marihuana Reconsidered, 354 - 355)

"About 300,000 mostly young people are arrested on marijuana
charges each year, and the political climate has now
deteriorated so severely that it has become difficult to discuss
marihuana openlly and freely.  It could almost be said that
there is a climate of psychopharmacological McCarthyism.
  One indication of this climate is the rise in mandatory drug
testing, which is analogous to the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy
era.  Hardly anyone believed that forced loyalty oaths would
enhance national security, but people who refused to take such
oaths risked loss of their jobs and reputations.  Today we are
witnessing the imposition of a chemical loyalty oath.
Mandatory, often random testing of urine samples for the
presence of illicit drugs is increasingly demanded as a
condition of employment.  People who test positive may be fired
or, if they wish to keep their jobs, may be involuntarily
assigned to drug counseling or 'employee assistance' programs.
  All this is of little use in preventing or treating drug abuse.
 In the case of cannabis, urine testing can easily be defeated
by chemical alteration of the urine or substitution of someone
else's urine.   Even if the urine sample has not been altered,
the available tests are far from perfect.  The cheaper ones are
seriously inaccurate, and even the more expensive and accurate
ones are fallible because of laboratory error and passive
exposure to marihuana smoke.  But even an infallible test would
be of little use in preventing or treating drug abuse.
Marihuana metabolites (breakdown products) remain in the urine
for days after a single exposure and for weeks after a long-term
user stops.  Their presence bears no established relationship to
drug effects on the brain.  It tells little about when the drug
was used, how much was used, or what effects it had or has.
Like loyalty oaths imposed on government employees, urine
testing for marihuana is useless for its ostensible purpose.  It
is little more than shotgun harassment designed to impose
outward conformity." (Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar,
preface to Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine)

"Ronald Reagan, for example, claimed a breakthrough in the War
on Drugs in 1982, citing an increase of drug arrests and
seizures.  By early 1983, however, the General Accounting Office
(GAO) has issued a report revealing that the figures used by
Reagan were the result of double counting, that is, that the DEA
and Customs, for example, were claiming some of the same
seizures [Freemantle, Brian.  (1986).  The Fix.  New York: Tom
Doherty Associates.  page 52.]." (Christina Jacqueline Johns,
Power, Idealogy, and the War on Drugs: Nothing Succeeds Like
Failure, 34)

"the public perception about the dangers of certain drugs has
been manipulated.  The dangers of illegal drugs are perceived to
be much more serious than the dangers of legal drugs, partly
because they are constantly discussed and presented in graphic
(if overblown) form.  The use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and
crack, therefore, has come to be perceived as 'real' drug abuse.
 Evidence of this can be seen in references to 'drug and alcohol
abuse'; the phrase implies that alcohol is not a drug.  While
the dangers of legal drugs (like alcohol and tobacco) are not
ignored completely, they are hardly presented in the panic terms
of the targeted drugs in the drug war.  The public is not
subjected to extensive media campaigns dramatizing the dangers
of over-the-counter or prescription drugs.  Nor are the
destructive effects of alcohol and tobacco presented as eroding
the very fabric and internal security of the nation." (Christina
Jacqueline Johns, Power, Idealogy, and the War on Drugs: Nothing
Succeeds Like Failure, 58)

"Even though 3,000 teenagers start smoking every day, cigarette
companies are allowed to spend an estimated $3.3 billion every
year to advertise cigarettes.  An estimated 1 billion packs of
cigarettes are sold to minors every year, but according to the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite these violations only
three states reported citations against thirty-two vendors in
1989 for sales to minors.  Researchers at the CDC found only
minimal enforcement of laws restricting sales of cigarettes to
children in other states [Duston, Diane.  (6/1/90).  Smoking
Will Kill Five Million Youths, Surgeon General Says.  Montgomery
Advertisor: 4A.].
  Alcoholic beverage companies are allowed to spend hundreds of
millions of dollars each year on advertising that encourages
alcohol use.  When former surgeon general C. Everett Koop was
still in office, he called for a ban on alcohol advertising.
William Bennett, however, has refused to add alcohol to his
mandate as Drug Czar, and predictably enough, advertising trade
groups have opposed attempts in Congress to introduce any
restrictions on alcohol advertising.  These trade groups have
even gone to the extent of denying a connection between
advertising and consumption.  Dan Jaffe, executive vice
president of the Association for National Advertisers, was
quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying: 'Research has yet
to document a strong relationship between alcohol advertising
and alcohol consumption.  Let's not go off down a blind alley'
[Lipman, Joanne.  (2/23/90).  Lumping Alcohol into Drug War
Isn't Idea Industry's Warming To.  Wall Street Journal: B5.].
That they are going off down a blind alley should be news to the
companies who spend so much money advertising alcohol.
  The Partnership for a Drug Free America, a coalition of
advertisers, ad agencies, and media groups that produces some of
the most gruesome of the anti-illegal drug advertising, produces
no alcohol abuse advertising and reportedly has no plans to do
so.  This is not surprising, since the coalition's major
corporate sponsors include the Miller Beer parent company,
Philip Morris [Lipman, Joanne.  (2/23/90).  Lumping Alcohol into
Drug War Isn't Idea Industry's Warming To.  Wall Street Journal:
B5.]." (Christina Jacqueline Johns, Power, Idealogy, and the War
on Drugs: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure, 59)

"The mainstream media, dominated by corporate interests and
riddled with the fear of being negative, has virtually abdicated
its critical and investigative role.  While sensationalizing the
drug problem by presenting innumerable variations of 'Midnight
on Crack Street,' the media does very little questioning of the
strategies being employed by the state in the War on Drugs, and
it offers almost no useful analysis of the drug issue.  The
Democratic party has ceased to be a party of opposition.  The
intellectual poverty of the party is demonstrated clearly in its
failure to mobilize any response to the new proposals of the
Drug Warriors except more funds for treatment adn more money for
the War on Drugs in general." (Christina Jacqueline Johns,
Power, Idealogy, and the War on Drugs: Nothing Succeeds Like
Failure, 126)

  "This is not a culture that encourages intellectual activity or
communicates the joy of a conflict in ideas.  Robert W. Pittman,
the creator of MTV, has noted that in developing the cable
network he and others were merely capitalizing on a profound
difference between how younger people receive and process
information and how the pre-TV generation did.  He has argued
that the 'TV babies' do many things at once - watch TV, do their
homework, talk on the telephone [Pittman, Robert W.  (1/24/90).
We're Talking the Wrong Language to 'TV Babies.'  New York
Times: A15.].  Although he has argued that this is
characteristic of the TV babies, it is increasingly
characteristic of the population as a whole.  The pace of life
has increased to such an extent that people want information
quickly and in the least complicated form possible.  This may be
why Ronald Reagan was considered 'the great communicator.'
  Increasingly, people want images; people communicate not
through discourse but through images.  There is a kind of
impatience with discourse, with anything that cannot be absorbed
immediately with the least amount of work possible.  MTV and
politicians are well aware of this.  It has become apparent that
one image of Willie Horton is worth fifty well-reasoned
arguments.  This also explains the media frustration with Jimmy
Carter, who insulted this country by holding the notion that the
world was a complicated place, by failing to reduce every issue
to black and white, the good guys and the bad." (Christina
Jacqueline Johns, Power, Idealogy, and the War on Drugs: Nothing
Succeeds Like Failure, 179)

"In 1986, Regan went on television with props and photographs
(including a map of Latin America with a spreading red stain)
and charged that the Nicaraguan government was tied to the
international cocaine trade.  'I know,' he said, 'that every
American parent concerned about the drug problem will be
outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are
deeply involved in drug trafficking.'  A day after the speech
the DEA admitted that there was no evidence to back up the
charge [Black, George.  (1988).  The Good Neighbor: How the
United States Wrote the History of Central America and the
Caribbean.  New York: Pantheon Books.  page 165.]." (Christina
Jacqueline Johns, Power, Idealogy, and the War on Drugs: Nothing
Succeeds Like Failure, 152)

Driving Performance / Drug Testing

"One experimental project concerns the effects of marihuana as
compared to alcohol on driving performance as tested by a
driving simulator, which has been studied and found to be a
valid tester of driving ability.  The experimental team found,
using a fairly rigorous and systematic procedure of control and
double-blind technique, that 'subjects experiencing a 'social
marihuana high' accumulated significantly more speedometer
errors than when under control conditions, whereas there were no
significant differences in accelerator, brake, signal, steering,
and total errors.  The same subjects intoxicated from alcohol
accumulated significantly more accelerator, brake, signal,
speedometer, and total errors than under normal conditions,
wehreas there was no significant difference in steering errors.'
 The driving test was 23 minutes long, and included a total of
405 checks, broken down as follows: accelerator - 164; brake -
106; turn signals - 59; steering - 53; speedomoter - 23.
Because the simulator was so constructed that the driver could
not control the rate of the filmed stimuli, the speedometer
checks 'are not an indication of speeding errors, but of the
amount of the time spent monitoring the speedometer.'  But, as
the researchers note, 'comments by marihuana users ... report
alteration of time and space perceptions, leading to a different
sense of speed which generally results in driving more slowly.'
Although the selection of subjects was from a group of regular
marihuana users (who also were 'familiar with the effects of
alcohol - there were no teetotalers or chronic alcoholics'), and
accordingly the results of hte study might seem vulnerable on
the grounds that hte 'nature of selectioin probably resulted in
subjects who preferred marihuana  to alcohol and, therefore, had
a set to perform better with marihuana,' the study effectively
eliminated the possibility of any such subject bias.  'The main
safeguard against bias was that subjects were not told how well
they did on any of their driving tests, nor were they acquainted
with the specific methods used to determine errors.  Thus, it
would have been very difficult intentionally and effectively to
manipulate error scores.'  Perhaps the most striking finding of
the study was that 'simulated driving scores for subjects
experiencing a normal social marhuana 'high' and the same
subjects under control conditions are not significantly
different.  However, there are significantly more errors (P <
.01) for [alcohol] intoxicated than for control subjects
(difference of 15.4 percent) ... teh mean error scores of the
three treatments [were] ... control, = 84.46 errors; marihuana,
84.49 errors; and alcohol, 97.44 errors.'  Another interesting
observation was that 'Impairment in simulated driving
performance does not seem to be a function of increased
marihuana dosage or inexperience with the drug.'  Thsi was
suggested by 'retesting four subjects after they had smoked
approximately three times the amount of marijuana used in teh
main experiment.  None of the subjects showed a signficant
change in performance.  Four additional subjects who had never
smoked marihuana before were pretested to obtain control scores,
then given marihuana to smoke until they were subjectively
'high' with an associated increase in pulse rate ... All
subjects showed either no change or negligible improvement in
their scores." (A Crancer et al., "Comparison of the Effects of
Marihuana and Alcohol on Simulated Driving Performance,"
Science, 164 (1969), extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana
Reconsidered, 159 - 161)

"'The most provocative comment was the frequent report of the
ability to 'turn-off' the 'high' at time of stimulus
presentation, thus enabling S to perform as in a normal or
nondrugged state.'  In this study many of the subjects
reported the "turn-off" phenomenon to be a normal concomitant of
the marihuana experience.  This apparent ability to turn off the
marihuana "high" during periods requiring short attention spans
raises the issue whether such tests (which constitute the
majority of those used in studies reported to date) are valid
indicants of the marihuana experience or ismply measures of an
interesting concomitant of the drug's effect, namely, the
ability to respond normally at will?  Whether this phenomenon is
possible only for tasks of short-term duration or would be
manifest in sustained performance tests is partially answered in
the Weil et al. study (1968) where marihuana users improved from
baseline levels on digit symbol substitution and pursuit rotor
tests, both being more sustained performance tasks than any used
in the present study.  Furthermore, no performance decrements
were observed for a 5-minute continuous performance test
following marihuana smoking for either naive or experienced Ss.
Moreover, Crancer et al. (1969) have reported no impaired
performance for marihuana-intoxicated Ss in a simulated driving
condition.  All tests, however, were basically measures of
eye-hand coordination, whereas the present study measures pure
sensory response data."
(D. F. Caldwell et al., "Auditory and Visual Threshold Effects
of Marihuana in Man," Perceptive and Motor Skills, 29 (1969),
758-759.  He cites Weil et al., "Clinical and Psychological
Effects," and Crancer et al, "Effets of Marihuana and Alcohol."
All of this is extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana
Reconsidered, 161 - 162)

"The only reliable study to date of the relative degrees to
which alcohol intoxication and marihuana intoxication affect an
individual's ability to operate a motor vehicle demonstrated
that cannabis was significanntly less dangerous than alcohol in
this respect.  The study was carefully designed and well
controlled and, of course, the results were of great interest.
The manuscript was rejected by the Journal of the American
Medical Association and subsequently accepted for publication in
Science, one of the country's most prestigious scientific
journals, and one with an extremely critical editorial board."
(A. Crancer et al., "Comparison of the Effects of Marihuana and
Alcohol on Simulated Driving Performance, " Science, 164 (1969),
851-854, extracted from Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana
Reconsidered, 329 - 330)

--
"Freud was convinced that 'the voice of the intellect will be heard.'
But no one understood better than he that if reason is to triumph,
it has to sound above the clamor of conflicting emotion and the roar
of primitive desires." (Zinberg and Robertson, _Drugs & The Public_, 242)