Drugs: Pot: Safer than Alcohol?

More Americans than ever are turning on with marijuana. Most of them are under 21, but an astonishing number of respectable adult citizens are also using “sticks” or “joints” or “grass.” Obviously no one knows the total, since possession of a single cigarette is a crime. But Commissioner James L. Goddard of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cites estimates that as many as 20 million Americans may have used marijuana at one time, while 400,000 some say as many as 3,000,000—may now be smoking it regularly.

The vast majority of users declare that marijuana is simply an escape hatch, probably no more dangerous—even if less tasty—than alcohol. Smoking pot, they say, should be as socially and legally acceptable as drinking cocktails or highballs. In this they are supported by a growing number of physicians, psychologists, sociologists and criminologists. But they are vigorously opposed by both U.S. and state law-enforcement officers. Notable among these is Commissioner Henry L. Giordano of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who sees the use of marijuana as “a vice which draws with it a train of depravity stretching far into the future.”

Rarely Hashish. Which side is right? The fact is that although man has been using marijuana or related products for 5,000 years, medical science still knows too little about it. Research—even on animals—is hampered by red tape written into restrictive laws and lack of a standardized natural product.

Compounding the confusion, marijuana itself is an inexact term. All marijuana comes from the female hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, which grows worldwide. As the plants ripen, their flower and seed heads exude a resin that contains the highest natural concentration of active cannabis chemicals. The pure resin is hashish, a combination of powerful chemicals. Hashish, by Giordano’s own testimony, rarely reaches the U.S.

What the Mexicans christened marijuana (literally “Mary Jane”) is a variable combination of female cannabis seed heads with leaves and chopped-up stalks. At best, say U.S. pharmacologists, the mixture is only about one-tenth as strong as hashish. Marijuana is illegally imported into the U.S., mainly from Mexico, either loose or in the form of pressed bricks, called “keys” (for kilos), weighing 2.2 lbs. Connoisseurs strain out the coarse stalks before rolling it into cigarettes or packing it loosely into long-stemmed, cooler-smoking pipes. For $5, anyone almost anywhere can buy enough through his office boy or teen-age offspring to make six cigarettes.

Overexpectation. As with alcohol, it can be used in a variety of ways and to a variety of degrees. Like their fathers and mothers, who learned to hold their liquor in college, today’s youngsters have to learn how, when, where and why to use how much marijuana. A common experience is to feel no effect whatsoever the first time marijuana is used. Quite contrary to the effects of alcohol’s first use, this is probably a result of overexpectation, apprehension about the unknown, and the pervasive awareness of doing something illegal. This last aspect is one reason that photographed pot parties often look furtive and clandestine. “The first time I ever smoked pot, I got upset, frightened and sick,” says a mid-thirtyish Chicago housewife.

A San Francisco architect got his first fraction of an ounce of pot as a gift. He and his date did a ham-handed job of rolling joints that dripped leaves at both ends. Somehow they smoked them. What happened? “Exactly nothing. The next night we rolled four joints and got down to some serious smoking. After about 20 minutes, I began to feel slightly high, as though I was beginning to be high on alcohol. My head and feet felt lighter. It felt like I was walking wobbly—which, it turned out, wasn’t so.”

Varied Effects. Once a marijuana smoker (or eater; marijuana can be mixed into such foods as salads and brownies) becomes accustomed to pot, the effect varies according to the individual. The same, of course, is true of alcohol. “The number of joints smoked depends on the mood and the group,” says the Chicago housewife. “I remember one calm, musical evening when three of us went through 14 sticks. I remember another when 20 of us smoked only three.” She can get high on two Scotches, and has on occasion drunk enough liquor to pass out. “But,” she says, “the high on liquor is much rougher and harder. I’ve never passed out on pot, and never done anything that I didn’t remember or wouldn’t have done while not smoking. With pot, you have much better control over your senses and actions.”

Medically, alcohol is a depressant; so is marijuana. Therefore, it often depresses libido. But the offsetting release of inhibitions can make sex more acceptable and enjoyable—although marijuana is no aphrodisiac.

“Eventually,” says the San Francisco architect, “my first marijuana high turned into a laughing jag that was infectious. Each of us roared at the other’s antics. We put on some phonograph records and were captured utterly by the music. Eventually we grew affectionate and made love. I have since taken marijuana many times around attractive girls with whom I shared no emotional relationship, and there was no sexual attraction to speak of.

“Marijuana defies quantification by its very essence; you must learn to handle it comfortably. Almost always it makes us hungry, and we eat ravenously—just about anything, all of which tastes much better than ever before, since the senses for some reason seem to be more on the beam.”

Strawberry Ice Cream. There is such a thing as too much pot, and such a thing as getting “stoned” on it. Stoned on alcohol, the ordinary social drunk can become maudlin, irrational, incoherent and perhaps physically ill. A smoker who has had too much pot, says the San Franciscan, tends to become “quite anxious, overly self-conscious and very ill at ease. These are usually intensely personal discomforts that are hard to articulate, but they are usually short-lived—say, two hours long at the most. I have had very moving illusory experiences under pot too. These aren’t true medical hallucinations, since I knew full well at the time that they were the results of my intoxication and would pass.” But he insists, as do most pot smokers, that there is not a trace of morning-after hangover.

From his own experience, the architect has decided that “pot certainly isn’t addictive in the normal sense. For those who like it, it’s as habit-forming as strawberry ice cream to people who love that dessert. Since my first try, I have gone as much as six months without so much as a puff.”

It was just this sort of undramatic report, repeated time and time again, that led Dr. Goddard to make some top-of-the-head remarks to students at the University of Minnesota last fall. “Whether or not marijuana is a more dangerous drug than alcohol is debatable—I don’t happen to think it is.”

Two Vices for One? Then there are the physicians and lawmen, like Commissioner Giordano, who indict marijuana on three counts: 1) it builds up an addictive need for continued use, 2) it leads often and almost inevitably to the use of hard narcotics such as heroin or to LSD,* 3) it impairs mental functioning at least temporarily and may damage the mind permanently or even destroy all rational mentation.

Except for Item 2, there are obviously parallel charges that can be leveled at the excessive use of alcohol. But Giordano declares: “Surely it is not valid to justify the adoption of a new vice by trying to show that it is no worse than a presently existing one.”

But are the charges true? The answer, in view of the dearth of scientific research, cannot yet be conclusive. But there is significant evidence in the history of marijuana during the hundred-odd years before 1967, when it was commonly prescribed for sedation, senile insomnia, menstrual disorders, epilepsy, severe neuralgia and migraine.

No Withdrawal. One who has intensively studied the 100-years record is Dr. Tod H. Mikuriya, now a psychiatrist in private practice in San Francisco but last year a consultant on cannabis research to the National Institute of Mental Health. All the evidence from a century’s medicinal use, says Dr. Mikuriya, shows that the drug is not a narcotic in the medical sense. It is not physiologically addicting, so there are no withdrawal pangs. There is little or no buildup of tolerance that would lead to the use of increasing doses, as is the case with the true narcotics—opium, its refined extracts (heroin, morphine’ codeine) and their synthetic substitutes. Additionally, Dr. Mikuriya reported, cannabis is so nearly nonpoisonous that to kill one mouse requires 40,000 times the dose that makes a man high. By contrast, 20 times the relaxant dose of alcohol can kill a man.

What of the fears that marijuana use will inevitably create an appetite for more dangerous drugs? Even marijuana’s defenders concede that most heroin addicts and LSD users have tried marijuana first, but they deny there is a cause-and-effect relationship. Most likely, they say, the disturbed individual seeking to escape will start with alcohol or the cheapest and most readily available drug, which happens to be pot. If he later takes to heroin, he would eventually have done so anyway.

Some evidence against the stepping-stone argument came a fortnight ago from Giordano’s own Bureau of Narcotics. The number of known hard-drug addicts, said Giordano, increased from 59,720 in 1966 to 62,045 at the end of 1967, or 3%. Moreover, the number of new addicts detected rose only from 6,047 to 6,417. If only one in a hundred of the potheads had switched to heroin last year, the increase would have been far greater.

Strung Out. Most physicians agree that the only physical effect of marijuana smoking is temporary impairment of visual and muscular coordination. As for mental effects, a few psychiatrists regard marijuana as a mild hallucinogen or mild psychedelic, but they are virtually unanimous in insisting that they have never seen a severe illness (psychosis) brought on by marijuana—in sharp contrast with the frequency of such breakdowns among people on LSD. Dr. Duke Fisher, of the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute, says: “When normal people take marijuana, there’s no adverse reaction. When pre-psychotic people take it, there can be a serious psychotic reaction, but then marijuana is only a catalyst, and often only in conjunction with LSD or some other powerful drug. A possible reaction in a disturbed but not psychotic person is to become ‘strung out’—psychologically dependent on marijuana.”

University of Chicago Psychiatrist Jerome Jaffe says flatly that he has neither seen nor heard of any admissions to mental wards that seemed to result from marijuana. But he concedes that there may be mental or brain damage from long-continued, high-dosage use of more potent cannabis preparations such as hashish.

Extreme Dosage. Last week, at a Chicago conference on psychedelic drugs, Dr. Donald R. Jasinski of the National Institute of Mental Health reported that he had produced LSD-like symptoms with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the purified active ingredients in cannabis. The test patient, he said, developed visual hallucinations, distortions of sensory perception, loss of insight, muscle rigidity and muteness. “He later related that he saw himself shrivel down to a doll, and witnessed his own funeral,” said Dr. Jasinski. To Dr. Harris Isbell of the Federal Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky., Dr. Jasinski’s experiments “definitely indicated that the psychotic effects of THC are dependent on dosage.”

Even though the average U.S. marijuana user is unlikely to get his hands on hashish, let alone refined THC, considerable research must be done into the properties of all cannabis preparations before legalization of marijuana can be rationally considered. Action in this direction is obviously needed; like Prohibition’s Volstead Act, current antimarijuana laws only result in the arrest of increasing thousands of young Americans each year without any deterrent effect. The use of marijuana is fast becoming a social phenomenon rather than a legal nuisance, but medical science and the law have not kept up with the change.

*Dr. Maimon Cohen, geneticist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, reported last week that in a study of 220 LSD users between 70% and 80% showed chromosomal damage in their blood cells—four times the normal rate. What is more, he said, babies of women who had taken LSD during the first three months of pregnancy showed increased chromosome breaks in body cells.