Marijuana Madness

Though I enjoy the political process and consider myself a politically savvy person, I generally like to keep politics out of my columns. In lieu of a study recently released, however, I can’t help but insert them in this here column.

Several town municipalities around the country are drafting ballot questions for voters to consider on whether or not to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana for recreational use. In Essex County in Massachusetts, for instance, should Ballot Question 2 pass, the possession of one ounce or less of marijuana would set back the owner a hundred bucks. That’s it. No other punitive measures taken (with the exception of a “drug awareness program” offenders 18 years of age and younger would have to undergo within a year of the offense.

Massachusetts would become the 12th state to decriminalize marijuana use should the ballot initiative pass. This means that nearly a quarter of the United States will essentially be saying to the other 3/4ths of the country that we don’t think marijuana use is all that bad.

Views on marijuana run the gamut, but in my view, decriminalizing marijuana use sets a dangerous precedent. Perhaps the most significant reason for its dangerousness is that it’s a gateway to other narcotics. Just ask any student that’s gone through a “scared straight” program and they’ll tell you that the inmates that spoke to them began using or dealing marijuana before they got into more serious drug use and crime-related activity (hence the term “gateway”).

The other reason, of course, is the impact marijuana has on health, particularly the brain. Professors of Psychology and Psychiatry – hailing from the University of Cincinnati and University of California, San Diego, respectively – looked at images of adolescent brains, most of whom had used marijuana throughout their teen years. They also put these teenagers through a battery of tests to see if there was any diminished capacity in their memory and motor skills.

What they found through neuroimaging was that compared to other teenagers’ brains who had no history of marijuana use, the brains of the marijuana users required more brain capacity to accomplish fairly simple tasks. Despite the simplicity of these tasks, the marijuana users were slower in their reaction time, displayed a diminished ability to remember verbal cues, and were oftentimes unable to remember the location of certain objects. In short, as Professor Krista Lisdahl Medina of the University of Cincinnati says, “The brain [was] working harder than it should.”

And unlike the smoking of cigarettes, where the cessation of smoking brings about improved lung capacity and function in a fairly short period of time, the diminished functionality of chronic marijuana users remained evident despite going a month without using.

The research, supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, was presented in Boston recently at a meeting for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Supporters of marijuana’s decriminalization appeal to people’s emotions by saying that decriminalizing marijuana gives adolescents a better chance at finding a job or getting a student loan: Why burden their future with an arrest record for trivial amounts of marijuana? I’ll tell you why. Because in every state that marijuana’s been decriminalized, its use has increased. And that’s exactly why decriminalizing marijuana is wrong: it send the message to kids – particularly adolescents whose brains are still in their formative stages – that it’s not such a bad thing and has no serious health consequences. This study illustrates the flaw in that argument.