What Experts Say

Virtually all studies taken by governments have shown cannabis to be the most benign intoxicant in use today. The clear conclusion is that personal use should not involve criminal sanctions. It is disturbing to think that all these studies have been sponsored by tax-payers' money, yet the governments still choose to ignore them.

Virtually all studies taken by governments have shown cannabis to be the most benign intoxicant in use today. The clear conclusion is that personal use should not involve criminal sanctions. It is disturbing to think that all these studies have been sponsored by tax-payers’ money, yet the governments still choose to ignore them.

1930s propaganda movies like the infamous Reefer Madness warned that marijuana leads to acts of shocking violence, incurable insanity, and sexual licentiousness. In the 1970s government experts claimed it contributed to the growth of abnormally large breasts in young men. In the 1980s marijuana was accused of causing homosexuality and AIDS, as well as both increasing and decreasing sexual activity. Books like Marijuana Alert were so frightening that many users switched to alcohol, cigarettes, and other addictive and dangerous drugs. The author of the book stated that a man can drink quite heavily for 20 to 30 years without alterations to the brain, but using pot for even a short time will cause brain damage. President Ronald Reagan said in a warning against marijuana use: “I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast.”

Sadly, such anti-marijuana misinformation, whether from the 1930s or the 1980s, is still alive, widely distributed in many countries. This propaganda has resulted in decades of fear-mongering from generations of guardians of youth: teachers, police, clergy, parents.  People the world over worry that their children will go insane, participate in sexual orgies, become murderers, heroin addicts, or at the very least criminals. Clearly, the propaganda has had its effects. The American National Academy of Sciences states: “Over the past 40 years, marijuana has been accused of causing an array of anti-social effects: in the 1930s, provoking crime and violence; in the early 1950s, leading to heroin addiction; and in the late 1950s, making people passive, lowering motivation and productivity, and destroying the American work ethic in young people. Although belief in these effects persists among many people, they have not been substantiated by scientific evidence.” 

Three relevant quotes from vastly different notables apply here. Thomas Jefferson, an archetypal Renaissance man along with being the third US president, noted that an uninformed person is in a better situation than a misinformed one: "He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." Gerald Massey, a more modern poet and Egyptologist wrote: “They must find it difficult...Those who have taken the authority as the truth, rather than the truth as the authority”. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, came up with an effective formula for indoctrinating the masses: if you keep on repeating a lie over and over again, it finally becomes a well known truth.

What really are the short and long term effects of using cannabis?

Reports of Official Commissions

In the 19^th century a British government committee in India stated that it was difficult to separate the medical application of hemp from its recreational use.  Experts reminded that hemp had been used from time immemorial and was sanctioned by religion. They declared against prohibition and for a policy of harm reduction.

One of the later pioneers of anti-prohibition was New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who did not believe the federal government’s blaming marijuana for the increased crime rate among juveniles; he said there should be no laws which could not be enforced. LaGuardia formed a team of 31 scientists of various specialties who for 7 years examined the problem from both medical and sociological points of view. In 1943 they refuted most of the propaganda myths, stating that consumption of cannabis did not lead to aggressive or uncontrolled sexual behavior and did not disturb one's personality. This was the first of many official reports to be censored, confiscated, or thrown out by the US government. Decades later, the same would happen with the conclusions of a committee appointed by President Nixon, and more recently a report by the WHO.

Committees were brought into existence in the 1960s and 1970s by governments in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands, all of whom were responding to the growing popularity of cannabis. Each committee reached similar conclusions to those of the LaGuardia commission. Such committees usually consisted of experts initially unfavorable to cannabis; they should be praised for their objectivity and ability to verify data. This was the case with the Baroness Wonton Committee in Great Britain. Wonton was a social scientist and Governor of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The committee consisted of psychiatrists, a pharmacologist, a sociologist, and an experienced police officer. In 1969 the committee published a report which agreed with the conclusions of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and with New York’s Mayoral Committee on Marihuana that long term consumption of cannabis in moderate doses had no harmful effects. The committee warned against strident populism as, once, coffee and tea had also been radically condemned.

President Johnson’s 1967 Commission on Law Enforcement and the  Administration of Justice stated that marijuana is equated in law with opiate products, but the characteristics of abuse of the two substances have almost nothing in common. Only a small percent of marijuana users graduate to heroin.

In 1972, the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse appointed by president Nixon advised the US Congress to remove criminal penalties on the possession and nonprofit distribution of marijuana. "Neither the marijuana user nor the drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety," concluded the commission. Nixon was furious about the report’s findings, which could prove to be politically harmful, and decided to ignore it.

Canada’s Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, often referred to as the Le Dain Commission after its chairman Dean Gerald Le Dain, completed its work in 1972. The final report recommended cannabis be removed from the Narcotic Control Act and that the provinces implement controls on possession and cultivation similar to those governing the use of alcohol. The Commission also warned against “the destruction of young lives and a growing disrespect for law”.

In 1998 the world largely ignored the scandalous news that the WHO had removed an entire chapter from its report on a 15-year examination of the harmfulness of drug addiction. The chapter compared alcohol to nicotine and cannabis. The report stated, among other points, that marijuana, contrary to alcohol, did not negatively influence development of the fetus, and that it did not block the respiratory system or negatively affect the lungs like nicotine. Why was there so little reaction to such censorship? The American government warned WHO with a predictable military metaphor that the report would give ammunition to camps fighting for the legalization of marijuana. Prof. Mikolaj Kozakiewicz, social scientist and Marshal of the Polish Parliament, commented on the situation by stating that once again science had been sacrificed for political, religious or ideological purposes.

The same year, a committee appointed by the French Minister of Health examined legal and illegal drugs and divided them according to their addictive power and harmfulness to health and society. French experts categorized all drugs into three distinct categories: those that pose the greatest threat to public health, those that pose moderate harm to the public, and those substances that pose little-to-no danger. Alcohol, heroin, and cocaine were placed in the most dangerous category, while investigators determined that cannabis posed the least danger to public health.  Marijuana was the only illegal element of the least dangerous group.

Amnesty Now!

A few commissions went even further. The Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs in Canada recommended in 2002 that the government amend Canadian legislation in order to create a criminal exemption scheme that would allow ‘for obtaining licenses, as well as for producing and selling cannabis’. The report refers to the Biblical references to cannabis and other historical accounts. The Canadian Senate Committee completed an exhaustive review of marijuana and health, concluding: "Scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue." The Committee  asked, as a consequence of this legislative modification, for an AMNESTY to be declared for any person convicted of possession of cannabis under current or past legislation.

A commission led by three former Latin American presidents, all considered political conservatives, called the drug war a failure – even pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point. In 2009, The Latin American Panel in Mexico City recommended that governments consider measures including decriminalizing the use of marijuana.

In 2011, the World Global Commission on Drug Policy called for the legalization of cannabis. A high-level international commission declared the global "war on drugs" a failure and urged nations to consider legalizing cannabis and other drugs to undermine organized crime while protecting their citizens' health. Former presidents and prime ministers, influential economists, writers, activists and leading members of the business community united behind a call for a shift in global drug policy. The 19-member panel includes former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Switzerland and Poland, as well as Kofi Annan (former UN Secretary General), George Schultz (former US Secretary of State), Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel prize laureate), and Richard Branson (businessman), among others.

Hemp Is Here To Stay

The UN Single Convention Treaty on Narcotic Drugs was originally declared in concert with suggestions from a delegation of US “drug warriors” in 1971 – one reason why American-style marijuana prohibition is enforced around the world. Jimmy Carter, former US President and 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has encouraged the American government to support and enact the reforms laid out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy. In 2011, Carter published an article called “Call Off the Global Drug War” in the New York Times in which he states: “In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

Richard Davenport-Hines, an award-winning British historian, considers the War on Drugs a technique of informal American cultural colonization. Clearly, the age of colonization is behind us. Professor Mitch Earleywine writes in Understanding Marijuana: a New Look at the Scientific Evidence: "We are close to a point where people can tolerate those who think differently. Perhaps we can tolerate people who want to use marijuana without doing harm to themselves or others." Legalization is around the corner.