From: [w--li--h] at [ix.netcom.com] (William House )
Newsgroups: alt.law-enforcement,alt.drugs,alt.drugs.culture,alt.drugs.pot,rec.drugs.cannabis,rec.drugs.misc,rec.drugs.psychedelic,talk.politics.drugs,talk.politics.libertarian,talk.politics.misc
Subject: War on Marijuana promotes teen alcohol use.
Date: 26 Oct 1995 11:57:02 GMT


here's an interesting article:

gopher://hemp.uwec.edu:70/00/drugs/war-on-drugs/pot.alcohol

                  Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company
                               The New York Times
                 June  17, 1992, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 1; Financial Desk
LENGTH: 823 words
HEADLINE: Economic Scene; Less  Marijuana,  More Alcohol?
BYLINE: By Peter Passell

 BODY:
   WHAT do teen-agers do when they are priced out of the market for
marijuana?

Some, presumably, take oboe lessons or join the 4-H Club. But others
look for solace in less wholesome pursuits. And, surprisingly,
economists may have more to say on the subject than toilers in the
fields of psychology or criminology.

   Drug policy is grounded on the premise that illicit drugs are birds
of a feather -- that reducing the availability of one decreases the
consumption of others. But economists who measure the demand for
illicit substances the way, say, Exxon analyzes the demand for grades
of gasoline, challenge this conventional wisdom. Their identification
of a strong substitution effect between  marijuana  and alcohol
suggests that the full court press against the weed is partly
responsible for stubbornly high levels of binge drinking by teen-
agers.

    According to the University of Michigan's Institute for Social
Research, the proportion of high school seniors regularly using
marijuana  fell to 14 percent last year, barely one-third the rate
reported in 1978. Their use of alcohol has been on the wane, too,
slipping by a fourth since the late 1970's.

   This might seem proof that alcohol and  marijuana  drugs are
complements --more like bread and jam than cake and pie. But simple
correlation cannot account for the slew of factors that influence drug
consumption over time and place.

   That is where a yet-to-be-published study by John DiNardo of the
University of California at Irvine and Thomas Lemieux of Princeton
fits in. Their work, supported by the Rand Corporation and the
National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, focuses on the
mid-1980's, when the threat of losing Federal highway aid forced
states to adopt a uniform minimum drinking age. In 1980, 1/2 the
states had minimum drinking ages ranging from 18 to 20. Eight years
later, all states were up to age 21.

   The two economists estimated demand curves for  marijuana  and
alcohol, using a variety of data that might influence consumption --
everything from parents' education to unemployment rates -- to isolate
the effect of drinking sanctions.  The good news is that the higher
"price" for alcohol -- that is, the greater difficulty of obtaining it
-- reduced drinking. The bad news: Other factors being equal, raising
the drinking age from 18 to 21 increased the proportion of high school
seniors who smoked  marijuana  by an estimated 10 percent.

   To Peter Reuter, an economist at Rand, this conclusion is most
interesting for what it implies about  marijuana  policy in the
1980's. If  marijuana  is a substitute for alcohol, he notes, alcohol
is, by definition, a substitute for marijuana.  Thus tough  marijuana
enforcement must increase drinking. And, indeed, another new study for
the National Bureau of Economic Research by Karen Model suggests Mr.
Reuter is on the mark.

   Ms. Model, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, examined the impact of
marijuana decriminalization on hospital emergency room admissions for
drug abuse reported to the Federal Drug Abuse Warning Network in the
mid-1970's. And as the substitution hypothesis would suggest, Ms.
Model found that emergency room episodes related to drugs other than
marijuana  were 12 percent lower in the states that had decriminalized
the weed. Lowering the effective "price" of marijuana,  she concluded,
reduced the abuse of other substances.

   The data did not allow Ms. Model to isolate alcohol emergencies
from those caused by the use of heroin, cocaine or prescription
chemicals. But Ms. Model believes alcohol is far and away the most
likely drug replaced by  marijuana.  Both alcohol and  marijuana  were
widely seen by users as "soft" recreational drugs, in contrast to,
say, cocaine, heroin or LSD.

    Marijuana  and alcohol use are both down; why, then, worry?
Because the level of teen-age alcohol abuse remains remarkably high.

   In 1991, some 30 percent of high school seniors reported having had
five or more drinks in a row sometime in the previous two weeks. The
comparable figure for college students (almost all of whom had to
break the law to obtain alcohol is 43 percent -- and there is no
downward trend.

  To those who focus on the risk of accidental injury and other
medical crises, heavy drinking seems a more serious worry than
marijuana.  Ms. Model found that other factors equal, states
decriminalizing  marijuana  reported lower overall rates of drug- and
alcohol-related emergencies.

   And while both substances have been implicated in auto accidents,
Frank Chaloupka, an economist at the Chicago campus of the University
of Illinois, believes that substitution toward  marijuana is, on
balance, a life saver. In a statistical analysis that parallels Ms.
Model's, he found that states without criminal sanctions against
marijuana  possession suffered fewer auto fatalities.

   "If the choice is more  marijuana  use or more dead teen-agers,"
Mr. Reuter concludes, "the choice is easy."

[end of article]