Pharmacology

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VI Marijuana and Dangerous Drugs PDF Print E-mail
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Books - Marijuana, The New Prohibition
Written by John Kaplan   

Probably the most widely believed reason today for the criminalization of marijuana is the idea that experience with marijuana causes one to progress to the use of more harmful drugs. If so, a major benefit of any law that prevented marijuana consumption might be that it reduced the use of other drugs that did their users, and perhaps society, more serious harm.

Although the progression from marijuana to the narcotics such as the opiate heroin has received much the greater part of the attention devoted to this stepping-stone theory, we will post-pone that aspect of the discussion to the next chapter. In this chapter we will discuss the theory as it applies to what are usually called the "dangerous drugs"—stimulants such as the ampheta-mines, sedatives such as the barbiturates, and hallucinogens such as LSD. It will turn out that—perhaps because it has a more secure factual base and perhaps for the very reason that it has been less considered—a much better case can be made for a progression from marijuana to use of the dangerous drugs than to use of the opiates.

The Dangerous Drugs

Certainly the dangerous drugs are properly named. The amphetamines, while not truly addicting, are strongly habituating. Under medical supervision, they are used primarily as diet pills, but far larger quantities are illicitly used for their stimulant effect by individuals throughout our society. Amphetamine abusers range from the housewife who finds that she cannot get through the day without her "diet" pills (though she cannot get to sleep when she takes them) all the way to the intravenous amphetamine injector—the speed freak—who often spends several days without food or sleep in frantic drug-induced excitement and then lapses into a depression so uncomfortable that he must terminate it by taking still more of the drug.'

The barbiturates are in some degree the obverse of the am-phetamines. While the amphetamines are stimulants, or "uppers,'" the barbiturates are sedatives, or "downers." Their main medical use is as sleeping pills, but they are also widely used to lower excitement, anxiety, and inhibitions, acting in these respects very much like alcohol. The major dangers from the barbiturates are, first, that they are genuinely addicting, with their withdrawal symptoms even more dangerous than those of heroin, and second, that they produce a tolerance to their desired effects much faster than to their toxicity, so that a relatively small overdose in a regular user can, and often does, prove fatal.2

Finally, we have the hallucinogens, mainly LSD. LSD is the most recently discovered of the major dangerous drugs, and as a result, relatively little is known about its dangers. It has been implicated, though by no means conclusively, in chromosomal damage and has undeniably produced a significant number of psychoses. There are also hints as to a host of other dangers, but for our purposes here, we need only point out that by all accounts LSD is far more potent and dangerous than marijuana.3

The Meaning of Causation

The issue is, then, whether or not the use of mari-juana in fact causes the use of these more dangerous drugs. Before we discuss the evidence bearing on this question, it will be helpful to consider the nature of causation in somewhat more general terms. When we say that one event causes another, we mean that the second event would not have happened had the first not occurred. We usually define causation in terms of the "but for" test: causation exists if, but for the first event, or "cause," the second event, or "effect," would not have happened. According to this view of causation, it is fallacious to speak of one cause for an event. Each event will have many causes, only one of which will be the one we single out for discussion. Thus, even if we decide that marijuana use causes subsequent use of another drug, there will be other causes as well—such as the availability of the other drug and the personality of the user—that are necessary to produce the effect.

The problem of determining causation outside of the laboratory is a very difficult one; it requires us not only to observe events as they are but also to make hypothetical statements about whether the result would have taken place if the event charged to be a cause had not occurred. As a practical matter, this often requires knowl-edge we do not possess. Thus, in the debate over whether cigarette smoking causes lung caticer, very few people deny that smokers have a higher rate of lung cancer than nonsmokers and that heavy smokers have a higher rate than light smokers. The cigarette com-panies have denied vigorously that this shows causation. The evidence, they claim, is equally consistent with the existence of a predisposition toward lung cancer, which also involves a psychological need for cigarettes. Technically, they are correct; until we can say with confidence what does cause lung cancer and under what conditions, we cannot be absolutely sure. Whether a person accepts their explanation will depend on whether he believes that a predisposition toward lung cancer (and not most other kinds) would be correlated with a need for tobacco in cigarette (rather than pipe) form, and whether he disregards various other bits of evidence such as that showing that tars of the type contained in cigarette smoke have been shown, in carefully controlled experi-ments, to cause cancer in animals.

The problem, then, in determining whether marijuana use causes one to use dangerous drugs must be broken into several steps. First, we must investigate whether there is an association between the drugs: whether those who have used marijuana are more likely to have also used dangerous drugs. If there is no association we can safely dismiss any hypothesis of causation. On the other hand, the existence of an association by no means proves causation. There is, for instance, a strong association between the yearly sales of portable radios and those of computers. It is not, of course, that either has caused the other. Rather, both have been caused by the same thing—the invention and commercial develop-ment of the transistor.

Nor should implications of causation be drawn any more readily from associations when these associations are expressed more quantitatively in terms of percentages, correlation, coefficients, or the like. The fact is that statisticians delight in instances where strong associations can "prove" the most ridiculous causal connections. Thus a dramatic graph can be drawn connecting falls in the price of fruit with urban riots. No one, however, has had the temerity to try to base public policy on this and call for supports on fruit prices. The fact is simply that prices of fruit fall in summer, which has also been the major time for racial disturbances.

Determining when an association does involve causation is a very difficult matter. As in the case of cigarettes and lung cancer, portable radios and computers, and fruit prices and urban riots, this involves an examination of the possible reasons for the as-sociation. We must eliminate a whole host of other possibinties—the most significant of which is that, rather than marijuana use having caused the use of dangerous drugs, other things caused both.

Before we discuss the data on association and causation, however, there is one further point we must make as to the relation between causation and social policy. Since a result has many causes, it is an important task to determine which of them can be removed most effectively and at the least cost to prevent the result. Thus, during Prohibition a major cause of blindness was the drinking of illegal liquor. In other words, both the drinking of liquor and its illegality were causes. It turned out, however, after over a decade of effort, that it was far less costly to eliminate the illegality than the drinking. Similarly, it may well be that both the use of marijuana and its criminalization, acting together, cause the use of more dangerous drugs. In that case, we must investigate whether the chain of causation might more easily be broken by modifying the criminalization of marijuana than by attempting to prevent the use of the drug.

The Association Between Marijuana and Other Drugs

There is no point attempting to generate any sus-pense over whether an association exists between marijuana use and use of the dangerous drugs. Although Stanley Yolles, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has estimated that five percent of chronic marijuana-users "are likely to proceed to the use of other, more dangerous drugs,"4 the chances are that this is a sizable underestimation. The fact is that there is a strong relation among virtually all kinds of drug taking and that a taker of any one drug is thereby considerably more likely to have taken any of the others. Moreover, though this principle seems to be true as to both legal and illegal drugs, marijuana use seems to be correlated espe-cially well with the use of almost all other drugs. This is shown by several studies. The tables below, summarizing Richard Blum's data on the student subculture, are revealing on this issue.

kaplan009

The sharp increase in marijuana use occurring after Blum's data was collected in 1966 has obviously changed the figures that Blum has computed. Hence the data has been brought more up to date in the very approximate estimates. Due to the absence of appropriate data, the estimate in Table I is considerably more subject to error than that in Table II.

More meaningful in statistical terms are the correlations between marijuana use and that of other drugs. Indeed the intercorrelations Blum found are so interesting that they are set out here:

kaplan010

First of all, it is interesting to note that every correlation on the entire list is positive (a zero correlation indicates no association, a correlation of one means a perfect correspondence, and a negative correlation means an inverse relationship). It is also interesting to note that the correlation between marijuana and hallucinogen use was not only high, but the highest of any pair of drugs covered in Blum's study (the second highest being the correlation between alcohol and tobacco use). In addition, the correlation between amphetamine and marijuana use was comparatively high, though not significantly higher than that between marijuana and tobacco use. Indeed, only the tranquilizers and sedatives seem to be excep-tions to the rule that the correlations between the use of marijuana and the use of other drugs are extremely high. Thus marijuana correlated with tobacco better than did any other drug except alcohol, with alcohol better than any other drug except tobacco, and with the amphetamines and hallucinogens better than any other drug.

We have evidence on this issue from studies other than Blum's. In the group of two hundred marijuana-users studied by Goode, forty-nine percent had taken LSD at least once, forty-three percent an amphetamine, and twenty-four percent a barbiturate? In all, two-thirds of Goode's marijuana-users had used another illegal drug. On the other hand, Goode's group was composed of especially heavy marijuana-users, who are known therefore to be more involved with other drugs as wel1.8 Other studies of marijuana use indicate that well under half of the run of marijuana-users have used another illegal drug.

Finally, on the issue of association between marijuana and dangerous drugs, Shick, Smith, and Meyers, in their study of the heavy drug-using Haight-Ashbury subculture, found extremely high usage of LSD, amphetamines, and barbiturates along with almost universal use of marijuana.°

Priority in Drug Use

In examining whether the association between mari-juana use and that of dangerous drugs implies a causal connection, we must look at one threshold issue. It is, of course, crucial in determining causation to show that the alleged cause did indeed precede the effect. Otherwise we may be no better off than the bright four-year-old who, passing by the back of an airconditioner, noted the hot air it expelled; then, noting the strong association between having air-conditioners on and hot weather, he concluded that it was the airconditioners expelling all that hot air that caused the weather to be so hot.

We must therefore ask whether, in those who have used both marijuana and dangerous drugs, the marijuana use or the use of dangerous drugs came first. This question is by no means as simple as it might appear. It is true that most of the published material indicates that marijuana is the first illegal drug used by most such drug-users. Thus, Lewis Yablonsky in his study of hippies estimates that seventy percent of them used marijuana as their first illegal drug." Blum's study reveals that of those who had used both marijuana and amphetamines, two-thirds had used the marijuana first, and with respect to the hallucinogen-users, the percentage having first used marijuana was even greater» On the other hand, quite surprisingly, Blum discovered that in those cases where the hallucinogen-user had used both marijuana and an amphetamine before the hallucinogen, the amphetamine use had preceded the marijuana use five times more often than vice versa.0 The signifi-cance of this portion of Blum's data is not at all clear. Assuming that it is not just a mistake in computation, it would be at variance with the beliefs of most of those involved in studies of drug use.

Moreover, inquiries concerning the order of drug use are especially vulnerable to certain types of misleading interpretation. First, phrasing the question in terms of illegal drug use may dis-guise the psychiatrically more meaningful fact that the subject used alcohol to excess before using any other drug. There is reason to believe that most abusers of the dangerous drugs have done just this. Even aside from alcohol abuse, drug-users often do not consider as illegal drug use early experiments with cough medicine or diet pills taken from the family medicine chest, even though this too is quite common among heavy drug-users. Finally, the classification together of users of all dangerous drugs may overlook very significant differences within this group. The student who uses without medical supervision an occasional amphetamine pill to help him study for an examination is, of course, very different from the heavy pill-popper or intravenous injector of the drug. Our data does not indicate the differing proportions of these two types of drug-users who more likely used marijuana as a first psychoactive or even as a first illegal drug.

As a result the most we can say on the issue of priority in drug use is that it is quite possible, but by no means clear, that most of those who represent the most serious problem with respect to usage of dangerous drugs have used marijuana before their major drug abuse. We must now examine the most difficult question: whether, in these cases, marijuana use can be said to be a cause of the later use of dangerous drugs.

An Alternative Mechanism

The first thing we must do in determining whether an association involves causation is to seek a mechanism by which the causation might take place. Certainly, no mechanism such as the carcinogenic effect of tars and resins in the example of cigarettes and lung cancer comes to mind. Pharmacologists have denied that anything in the nature of marijuana causes one to use other drugs, and this denial—except as to heroin, which we will discuss in the next chapter—has not been challenged. Later in this chapter we will discuss a number of mechanisms by which marijuana use may possibly be one of the causes of the use of dangerous drugs. At this point, we need note 'only that no simple explanation has yet been put forth and that we, therefore, should first examine the possibility that rather than marijuana use causing use of dangerous drugs, something else causes both.

The most obvious possibility is that the "something else" that induces the user to try many drugs is his own personality. There is no doubt that one persuasive explanation for the high correla-tions observed among the various kinds of drug use is that there are many individuals in our society who seem to feel better with one psychoactive drug or another in their systems. To some extent this may be due to certain not yet appreciated constitutional factors. Though our data on the issue are quite sketchy, Blum's findings are suggestive of various determinants of drug taking. Blum noted several interesting and statistically significant differences between the drug-users and the abstainers, including the intriguing fact that the drug-users more often reported remembering their illnesses with some pleasure and that, for them, whatever the drawbacks, there were definite advantages in being sick." Moreover, the view that dispositions toward drug taking involve some constitutional factors is supported by the commonplace observation that even from early ages many, though by no means all, children enjoy feelings of altered perception and consciousness. If you ask a child why he enjoys rolling down a hill, being whirled about in a swivel chair, or playing a game that involves his turning around and around and then trying to walk a straight line, he will often describe what fun it is being dizzy. It is likely, according to some observers,14 that this is merely a very youthful analogue of the disposition that in some leads to the taking of drugs in later life—perhaps for al-most the identical effect. Of course, this is not to say that all children who enjoy altered perception and consciousness will become drug takers. Many will grow out of it and others will be sufficiently educated concerning the dangers of drug use, or sufficiently restrained by religious or moral feelings, to avoid experi-mentation with drugs.

Other evidence supports the existence of this type of drug-taking disposition. As remarked earlier, even though marijuana is usually used before the dangerous drugs, closer study often reveals that marijuana was by no means the first drug used by heavy drug-users. Often alcohol, which was not only illegal at the age when used but also was consumed to excess, cough medicine or tranquilizers filched from parents, or even more unusual drugs such as glue or gasoline, turn out to have preceded marijuana use.

Blum's Trait Analysis

Another indication that it is a general drug-taking disposition that causes use of both marijuana and dangerous drugs comes from Richard Blum's data. By means of advanced statistical tech-niques, which we need not go into here, Blum was able to-reconcile his data with the existence of four independent traits or factors that seemed to be powerful determinants of overall drug use.15 This, of course, is not to say that the existence of these traits is proven; all we can say is that the pattern of drug-taking in Blum's sample seems to be most simply explained if we postulate the existence in each person of, in varying measures, four drug-taking traits. Trait I has high values, or, in statistical terms, "loadings," for marijuana and hallucinogens only and can be visualized as a "mind-expanding" or perhaps a "hippie" predisposition. Trait II has high loadings for the sedatives, tranquilizers, and to a lesser extent, the opiates; in common terms it can be thought of as a need for release from psychic pain and a slowing down of experience. Trait III has high loadings for tobacco and alcohol; it can be thought of as an inclination toward conventional drug use. And, finally, Trait IV has high loadings for amphetamines and very high loadings for opiates and special substances; it seems to be a pre-disposition to engage in self-destructive drug behavior or, at the very least, an attitude of "anything for a thrill."

Blum's analysis may explain why marijuana use seems to be correlated with that of so many other drugs. Trait I, the mind-expanding or hippie predisposition, appears to account for the bulk of the connection between marijuana and the hallucinogens.
kaplan011
The correlation of hallucinogen use with the occurrence of this trait in individuals is by far the highest of all the correlations, while that of marijuana use is also very high.17 The second of Blum's traits, the release from pain drive, seems not to involve marijuana at all; the sedatives and tranquilizers score by far the highest for this trait, with the opiates a poor third." On the third trait, the conventional drug-use predisposition, marijuana is moder-ately high, quite close to the amphetamines but far below tobacco and alcohol." And finally, on the fourth trait, that involving self-destructive-experimental use, marijuana rates fourth highest, far below the illicit opiates and the special substances and considerably below the amphetamines." It will, of course, remain for future work to verify the existence of these dispositions in the form postulated from Blum's factor analysis. The significant thing for our purposes here is that the fact that these traits can be statistically isolated is some evidence that the underlying personality of the user is a major cause of his drug-taking pattern.

Social Pressures Toward Drug Taking

Whether or not future research confirms Blum's hypothesis of specific psychological predispositions to use various kinds of drugs, there is no doubt that many young people in our society have generalized predispositions toward drug taking. This should hardly be surprising, for they have grown up in a society where the pressures toward drug taking considerably outweigh those against it. Today even four-year-old children are often exposed to television commercials for Excedrin, Tirend, Compoz and a host of other psychoactive substances. These commercials are far more common than is generally realized. One twenty-four-hour survey of the broadcasts over a San Francisco television station found that forty-seven of the total of 291 commercials involved "internal drugs"—including nine for alcoholic drinks; seven for tranquilizers; ten for cold pills, headache remedies, and stomach soothers; and twelve for cigarettes.21 On radio, the drug commer-cials were even more common. On three San Francisco stations they came at a rate of between 2.25 and 3 an hour.22

These commercials are not only numerous; they are insistent. The cigarette commercials tout the relaxed feeling one gets while smoking and imply that feminine companionship and masculine friendship come easier to the tobacco-user. A variety of other messages are beamed at the young person in our society to inform him that one generally functions better and more happily (remem-ber "Please, Mother, I'd rather do it myself") under the influence of one drug or another. And if this were not enough, many com-mercials, like the one just mentioned, are careful to associate guilty behavior (shouting at one's mother, who, after all, was only trying to help in the kitchen) with the absence of their drug, and hence to suggest that one assuage this guilt by drug taking. (The commercials for Compoz, an antihistamine with sedative side effects, have brought this to a high art.) It is hardly surprising, then, that a sizable percentage of young people develop early the idea that if one doesn't feel quite right he should take a drug to change the way he feels.

Nor need we blame today's high levels of drug use simply on the hard sell of drug commercials. The fact is that, by and large, parents today teach the same lesson by example. Although the drug-use patterns of the older generation are quite different from those of the younger, there are also major similarities. As we have noted several times earlier, the use of marijuana by the young closely approximates the patterns of alcohol use among their elders, and while we will examine in some detail later the comparative dangers of the two drugs, we need only say here that many young people today do not regard marijuana as occupying a very different place in their lives than alcohol does in those of their parents. In case this is not obvious from talking to young people, one might simply note San Francisco columnist Herb Caen's comment on the educational effect of parental drug use:

Parents are a sorry lot: Insurance Exec. Don Tenney placed a few articles and booklets on "Teenage Drug Abuses" throughout the house for the enlightenment of his sons, only to find all of them replaced the next day by pamphlets on alcoholism.23

Nor is alcohol the only drug that the young see their parents use. They know from a very early age that their mothers take the little yellow pills to relax and that the amphetamine pills so freely prescribed by doctors to aid in dieting really get many housewives through the day.

Most people do not fully appreciate the extent of legal drug use in our society. In 1967, two hundred million prescriptions—twenty percent of the nation's total—were written for psychoactive drugs: the barbiturates, the amphetamines, and the tranquilizers.24 When one adds to this total the countless number of "minor tran-quilizers" and other psychoactive drugs for which no prescription is required, and the "recreational" drugs, alcohol and tobacco, our society's drug consumption becomes impressive indeed.

Of late, moreover, we have nurtured the predisposition to use of drugs in yet another way. In former times drug use—at least the use of other than the socially approved drugs—was inhibited by the fact that these drugs were "medicine," and while medicine was perhaps good for you when you were sick, it usually tasted terrible and was certainly no fun. Nowadays, however, medicine does not taste so bad. Aspirin comes in candy flavors, cough medi-cine tastes like peppermint, and many formerly vile-tasting treat-ments have been turned into treats for the children.

In addition to those lessons the young have learned from their elders, we must consider also what they have learned more directly from one another. Almost every person who has commented on the general differences between youth today and in past years has been struck by a number of differences in values on the part of this younger generation. As we have pointed out earlier, commentators have been nearly unanimous in stating that the values of younger people today more often include an emphasis on the here and now, as distinguished from the more Puritan focus on the future, a heavy stress on experience for the sake of experience, and a concern with the internal world of thought and emotion rather than the external material world. This is not to say that all youths today are dominated by these values; indeed, only relatively few are--including, however, those that have dropped out into the hippie culture. On the other hand, a large number of youths in our culture, especially among the middle class and the more affluent sectors of society, have been strongly influenced, in greater or lesser degree, by the increased attraction of these values.

It should be quite clear that all of these youthful values tend to push in favor of drug experimentation. And when one considers that one of the major inhibitors of drug experimentation in the past—a respect for authority—is markedly diminished in today's young people, one would naturally expect that relatively high levels of drug use would be sanctioned by the culture of the young. The relation between a student's values and his use of drugs is amply documented in Blum's study. There the users of all the major illegal drugs were noticeably less attached to formal religion, con-sidered themselves more liberal politically, felt less in common with their parents, and tended to disapprove of more aspects of our society than those who had not used drugs."

Determinants of the Order of Drug Use

Although the preceding discussion has made more plausible the likelihood that marijuana use and the use of danger-ous drugs are both caused by innate predispositions, this is not a complete picture of reality. Such a hypothesis does not, without more, explain why marijuana seems to be used before the danger-ous drugs more often than vice versa. If multiple drug use were caused solely by the personality of the user, one might expect that it would be a strictly random choice as to which drug was used first.

If, however, our picture includes not only a generalized pre-disposition to use drugs but also a personality that is satisfied best by one particular type of drug experience, then the apparent progression is more easily explained. If this were so, and it appears not only possible but quite likely, one would expect that the user would try one drug after another until he found the drug that best suited him. Nor would the order be at all random. The mildest and most available drugs would be used first, and if these did not satisfy his needs, the user would gradually move up to the stronger and less available drugs.

Although this picture is, in general, accurate, the actual situation is somewhat more complex. The concept of mildness is a complicated one, involving the legality of the drug as well as its dangers. Thus, even though alcohol and tobacco are more commonly used than marijuana, studies of high-school and law stu-dents have indicated that both marijuana-users and nonusers re-garded alcohol and tobacco as more dangerous to their health than marijuana.2° And as applied to the amphetamines, which, when used for their psychoactive effect, are usually also illegal, the concept of mildness has other complexities. One Dexedrine pill taken to stay awake while studying is seen as less a "drug" than marijuana, while heavy amphetamine use, especially by injection, is thought of much more as drug use.

The concept of availability, moreover, is also complex. At least in the college, and probably in the high-school communities, marijuana has generally been more available than any of the other illegal drugs. For instance, eighty-five percent of the marijuana-users in Blum's sample reported that they had never had any dif-ficulty obtaining the drug,27 and it appears that, in large areas of the nation', on most high-school and college campuses, as well as in a large number of artistic and, more recently, professional sub-cultures, marijuana can be obtained on relatively short notice at almost any time. On the other hand, in periods of marijuana shortage the mildness and accessibility of a drug can point in op-posite directions. Marijuana, though felt to be mild, may be in very short supply, while methamphetamine (formerly sold under the name Methedrine, and commonly known as "speed"), the most widely abused of the amphetamines, can easily be made from freely obtainable industrial chemicals and hence is almost always available. We wiU discuss shortly the significance of this fact.

The Gradual Introduction Mechanism

With this background we can now speculate on one possible mechanism whereby marijuana use can influence at least some persons to experiment with dangerous drugs. Insofar as these drugs are regarded as stronger and more dangerous than marijuana, marijuana use may serve as a gradual introduction to them, soften-ing the transition from conventional use to the use of dangerous drugs. Or, put another way, even though an individual might be psychologically disposed to be most comfortable with one drug-taking pattern, he might, for various reasons, never become in-volved in that pattern. He might be so inhibited, by fear or scruple, from what would otherwise be his drug of choice that he never got to try it. To the extent that use of marijuana without ill effects lessens his inhibition as to other drugs, it may contribute to his experimentation and hence to his consistent use of the more dangerous drug. Such a view is hardly farfetched. We would prob-ably have many more sky-divers if there were some way to work up to the activity gradually.

This is, then, one plausible mechanism by which marijuana use may influence an individual to use other drugs. There are, however, several problems with using this causal mechanism as any justification for the criminalization of marijuana. First' of all, though it is theoretically possible and not unreasonable, the theory hardly rises to the dignity of a documented fact. And even if we knew that this mechanism did exist in some cases, we could not be at all confident that it was a major factor in the progression of any significant number of drug-users from use of marijuana to use of the hallucinogens or amphetamines. Secondly, if it is true that there is a culturally determined order in which young people will take drugs until they find the one they need, this would make each drug on the list a gradual introduction to the next. Marijuana, then, would be no more an introducer to dangerous drugs than alcohol is to marijuana—and, indeed, it is likely that in large areas of the nation today, the percentage of young alcohol-users who have "gone on" to marijuana is as high as the percentage of mari-juana-users who have "gone on" to dangerous drugs.

Finally, criminalizing marijuana is most ill-adapted to interfering with this kind of causal effect. While we now have rigid and highly penal laws that presumably restrict considerably the supply of marijuana available, they obviously fail to restrict the supply so much that people cannot use the drug. Thus, even among the fifteen percent of Blum's marijuana-users who had ever had difficulty in obtaining the drug for their own use, fully half got the drug merely by going to somewhat more trouble. And, while the other half simply did without it on those occasions, the data make quite clear that most of the time, in many of these areas frequented by young people, marijuana is obtainable with a mini-mum of difficulty. The high availability of marijuana is quite relevant to the gradual introduction mechanism. If indeed, as this theory would imply, it is marijuana use on a few occasions rather than heavy use over a long period that supplies the intermediate step between legal drug use and use of dangerous drugs, anything less than an enormous reduction in the availability of marijuana would have little effect upon the progression to dangerous drugs, especially since the ethic among marijuana smokers is sharing rather than hoarding the available supply. Up to now, our criminal law has hardly been effective in reducing the supply of marijuana; it would seem a forlorn hope to expect that, with any-thing like the resources society is prepared to devote to the prob-lem, we,could ever so restrict the supply of marijuana as to interfere with this mechanism of progression to dangerous drugs.

The Problem of Substitution

Moreover, even if such a law would be effective in doing away with marijuana as an introduction to the use of dangerous drugs, we would still have to consider whether this would do more harm than good. There is at least some reason to believe that significantly more successful enforcement of the mari-juana laws would stimulate rather than inhibit the use of the dangerous drugs. The picture of the drug-prone individual who uses marijuana for a while and then abandons it in favor of another more dangerous drug does not seem accurate except with respect to a relatively small percentage of the drug-using population. Most marijuana-users find that that drug meets their needs; they use marijuana occasionally and no stronger illegal drug.

As to these users, the effect of successfully restricting the marijuana supply would be unpredictable. Presumably, some would be induced to give up illegal drug use entirely, while others would be forced to use the more dangerous drugs. The problem is that because of their far lesser bulk and—at least with respect to the amphetamines and probably LSD—their much greater ease of production, the dangerous drugs are far more difficult to suppress even than marijuana. As a result, one major effect of choking off the marijuana supply would be to make the dangerous drugs the only illegal drugs available (except for the narcotics). In many areas and at many times both LSD and the amphetamines have been in greater supply than marijuana. At least as to those in-dividuals who need some ldnd of drug experience periodically, the lack of marijuana would simply exert a push toward the use of the more harmful drugs. This effect has been dramatically confirmed by Thomas Lynch, attorney general of California, and one of the law-enforcement officials most outspoken on the need for strict and highly penal marijuana control. According to Attorney Gen-eral Lynch, the increase in the use of dangerous drugs

. . . is attributable to a marijuana smoking population which finds dangerous drugs an alternative in times of shortage and a variant to their regular habits. The drug statisticians in the California State Bureau of Criminal Statistics have concluded that marijuana and dangerous drugs are alternatives and interchangeables within the drug family. If one declines in rate of abuse the other will increase.28

Although Mr. Lynch refuses to draw from this the obvious conclusion that his efforts at suppression of marijuana are, insofar as they are successful, doing his state more harm than good, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, ironically, had pointed out just such a danger some seventy-five years earlier.

Among the reasons the commission recommended against the criminalization of marijuana products was its view that one of the most dangerous side effects of this prohibition would be the in-crease in use of considerably more harmful drugs.29 To compound the irony further, a major drug that worried the Hemp Drugs Commission was datura, an extract of a plant that grows wild not only in India but over much of the Western United States, where it is sometimes known as jimsonweed or locoweed. It contains several powerful psychoactive drugs that are undeniably far more dangerous than marijuana. And though the scant evidence available suggests that its use in the United States has been mini-mal until very recently, it is interesting to note that during the marijuana shortage in the summer of 1968 (whether this was due to a restriction of supply or a great increase in demand over the rest of the nation is not clear) reports were published about the use of this "new" drug in Southern California.

And though the use of the datura fortunately is not yet wide-spread, there is ample data confirming Attorney General Lynch's report of a Pyrrhic victory over marijuana. Newsweek, for instance, referring to the period of Operation Intercept (discussed in Chap-ter X), reveals:

Most ominous of all, the shortage of grass has driven many marijuana fanciers to sample heavier stuff: speed (arnphetamines), acid (LSD), mescaline (which is suddenly in plentiful supply), smack (heroin), and even alcohol. "I know of four kids—and they're really kids, like under 16—who've tried smack because they couldn't get grass," reports one Cambridge dealer. . . . This phenomenon worries Dr. David E. Smith, director of the strug-glidg Haight-Ashbury Clinic in San Francisco. "The government line is that the use of marijuana leads to more dangerous drugs," he notes. "The fact is that the lack of marijuana leads to the use of more dangerous drugs."30

Finally, this view that marijuana use inhibits rather than causes the use of more dangerous drugs is confirmed by the fact that, after the end of Operation Intercept, when marijuana again became freely available in the high schools, students stopped using the far more dangerous "reds" (a barbiturate) and, as one student stated, "everyone is going over to weed."31

In discussing the effect of restrictions upon the marijuana supply, however, we must remember that for many users we are in the realm of the hypothetical. Where drug-prone individuals can either assure themselves of a steady supply of the drug or lay in enough in good times to tide them over lean ones, the effect of the marijuana laws in limiting them to the use of other drugs more dangerous than marijuana is not very acute. The present situation with respect to the marijuana supply, however, is almost calculated to make this problem as serious as possible. Rather than having a steady though perhaps insufficient supply, the marijuana market seems to be one of easy availability most of the time with occasional severe droughts caused by the difficulties of illegal production or sudden, but short-lived, antismuggling drives.

Marijuana Criminalization as a Cause of the Use of Dangerous Drugs

We have thus far discussed the possibility that the use of marijuana might cause one to use dangerous drugs, without taking account of the fact that any involvement with marijuana is a serious criminal offense. Once we consider this, however, it is possible to come up with several quite plausible causal mechan-isms by which the illegality of marijuana itself may reinforce any innate disposition to use dangerous drugs. We have already men-tioned the influence of the marijuana laws upon drug education. Once an individual has tried marijuana and convinces himself (whether rightly or wrongly) that the drug is vastly less danger-ous than he has been taught, he will be far more prone to dis-believe all "authoritative" statements on the danger of drug abuse. This may not be enough to cause him to use dangerous drugs, but, together with various other factors such as the drug's availability, peer-group pressure, and personal inclination, his lowered appreciation of the danger, caused indirectly by his use of illegal marijuana, may well have been a "but for" cause of progression.

In addition, the gradual introduction causal mechanism discussed earlier turns out to depend heavily upon the criminalization of marijuana. The reason why marijuana can presumably be more of a gradual introduction to dangerous drugs than alcohol is not because marijuana is somehow a "stronger" drug than alcohol. In fact, as shown in Chapter VIII, the exact opposite could as easily be maintained. The primary reason why marijuana can be more of an introduction is that it, like the dangerous drugs, is illegal. As an initial proposition it might have seemed a good idea to strengthen the association between marijuana and all the illegal drugs—narcotics as well as dangerous drugs. It might have seemed quite logical that by classing marijuana with the more hazardous illegal drugs we were, as a psychological matter, inhibiting its use by those who feared "harder" drugs. Now, however, this association is working against us. The number of young people who are not deterred from marijuana use has become so large that the psychological association we have attempted to engender, rather than inhibiting marijuana use, merely tends to make the use of the more dangerous drugs somewhat more respectable.

Moreover, there is another way in which criminalization of marijuana has, as a psychological matter, tended to make a stepping-stone effect to other drugs more likely. At least in the eyes of today's youth, society, by criminalizing marijuana, has forfeited a substantial part of the moral (and even purely in terrorem) effect of the criminal law in the drug area. Indeed, for the great majority of the marijuana-users, use of that drug represents their first seriously illegal act. It should hardly be surprising that when they commit this act and find that in the overwhelming majority of cases nothing serious happens, at least some of them become more prone to experiment with other illegal drugs. Since we have no evidence of an increase in crimes against person or property on the part of marijuana-users, it is not clear how much, if any, generalization of criminal behavior we may expect, and whether committing one type of crime predisposes one toward committing another'. The very least we can say on this issue is that, If the criminal law does exert a restraining influence on the use of more dangerous drugs, this influence is sharply diluted by the fact that a large fraction of potential users of these drugs have already violated the drug laws by using marijuana.

In all the above arguments, marijuana use is a "but-for" cause of at least some use of dangerous drugs. It is more meaningful, however, to regard marijuana and its criminalization as concurrent causes, each of which is necessary to the progression.

Marijuana and the Drug Culture

In discussing whether and by what means mari-juana use causes use of dangerous drugs, we have thus far examined relatively simple theories of causation in which we con-sidered the interaction of marijuana, its criminalization, and the psychology of the user. In fact, however, probably the most signif-icant ways in which marijuana is related to the use of dangerous drugs are more complicated than this, and within the domain of sociology rather than psychology.

One obvious social mechanism is that:

By smoking marijuana, one is to some degree forced to interact with the criminal underworld. The seller of marijuana is invariably also a narcotics supplier. By buying marijuana, one often interacts with, forms friendships with, comes to respect the opinions of, the seller of the drug. He is generally older, more experienced and sophisticated, involved in a daring and dangerous life, is respected and eagerly sought after by many members of one subcommunity. This interaction can be seen as having a kind of "hook" attached to it: the seller does not make as much profit from the bulky, low-priced, sporadically used marijuana as he would selling [other drugs], so that he is, therefore, anxious to have his customers use the more profitable drug[s]. The neophyte drug user gradually acquires the seller's favorable definition of—and accepts oppor-tunities for—Eother drug] use.32

While this is a plausible mechanism whereby marijuana use might cause use of dangerous drugs, it is probably too simple. The sellers of marijuana for the most part do not accord with this picture. To understand better the sociological mechanism of pro-gression from marijuana use to use of dangerous drugs, we must take a more detailed look at what is called "the drug culture."

Actually, it is inaccurate to speak of "the drug culture." There are several different drug cultures; the ghetto heroin culture, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is very different from the middle-class white drug cultures that are built upon LSD and the amphetamines. Moreover, there appear to be several different kinds of middle-class white drug cultures, ranging from "com-munes," where, at least in the more ordinary ones, drug use, com-munal living, and a back-to-nature movement are the major values, all the way to groups of high-school students who compete with one another both in drug use and in delinquency. Two of these drug cultures, however, deserve special discussion: the campus and the hippie cultures.

The Campus Drug Culture

The campus culture consists in great part of experimenters. Many are comparatively heavy drug-users who are much more attracted to the hallucinogens (primarily LSD but also the more exotic drugs such as STP, DMT, etc.) than to the amphetamines. Though their drug use extends far beyond the occasional use of marijuana that characterizes the mere recreational users, it gen-erally is not on the scale of the hippie culture, since this would be incompatible with the demands of even the less demanding academic institutions. When his drug use or other psychological problems sufficiently interfere with his schoolwork, the member of the campus drug culture will often drop out and join another culture, most likely the hippie. Often, however, with his drug use under some control, he will graduate from school and somehow adjust to the demands of the outside world.

Several years ago marijuana played a considerable part in the recruitment into the campus drug culture. The members, then as now, were alienated from American values and considered the taking of drugs, especially LSD, the way to enlightenment and personal freedom. Marijuana served as a recruiter into this cul-ture for several reasons. First, the marijuana-user could be more easily alienated from the society that made him guilty of a serious criminal offense. Second and probably more important, since mari-juana use is primarily a social activity, the beginning user who smoked' the drug with those more deeply involved in the campus drug culture found that two things happened. Since marijuana was illegal, he had to depend upon members of the drug culture not only for his marijuana supply but also for all sorts of infor-mation on how to escape detection; and through social contact he became more likely to adopt their values and attitudes toward drug taking.

It is likely, however, that in the past few years the influence of marijuana on recruitment into the campus drug culture has declined considerably. Although Blum reported that the mari-juana-user was likely to have values relatively close to those of the users of drugs such as LSD, in the two years intervening since the collection of his data, the percentage of marijuana-users, at least in one of the schools he examined, has more than tripled while the use of LSD did not increase appreciably.33 As the number of students who use marijuana approaches the total population of the student community, it becomes harder and harder to make statements differentiating those who had used mari-juana from the norm. Indeed, when marijuana experience hovers around seventy percent of a studied population, it becomes much more meaningful, and more significant statistically, to make gen-eralizations about the minority who have not used the drug than about the majority who have. As a result, since the use of LSD has increased little on the campuses, the estrangement between the values of the average marijuana-user and the users of harder drugs has increased significantly.

Furthermore, in large areas of the United States today, the campus drug culture is no longer necessary to initiate one into marijuana use or to assure a supply of the drug. Marijuana use is so widespread today that many youths who are otherwise "straight" can provide sufficient support, fellowship, and supply for one an-other.

This is not to say that marijuana no longer bears any relation to recruitment into the campus drug culture. A much lower but still perceptible portion of the marijuana-users are drug-culture mem-bers and they remain ready to socialize new marijuana-users into their group rather than into the mainstream of recreational users. Moreover, this type of socialization is made somewhat mop easy by the fact that the criminalization of marijuana gives members of the campus drug culture more status than perhaps they would otherwise enjoy. After all, their peers are drug criminals just as they are.

The Hippie Drug Culture

More noticeable than the campus drug culture is the "hippie" culture, centered in enclaves in most of our major cities from New York's East Village to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Though there are obvious differences among these "drug scenes," most observers agree about their fundamental characteristics. Probably the most important point of agreement is that, although drug use is almost universal in the cultures, it is by no means the only determinant of membership. The hippie cultures involve, much more than drug use, a whole life-style in which the members receive mutual support from one another and, as in any true culture, not only share a whole complex of values, but also pass along these shared values and attitudes to new members. At least on the surface, two of the most observable facets of this cul-ture are, first, the tendency of the members to place what Pro-fessor Howard Becker calls "side bets" upon their alienation by adopting what appears to the outside society to be bizarre methods of dress and appearance,34 and second„ the holding of a complex of values that rejects the values and institutions of the outer society. According to Professor James Carey, the exalted value in this type of culture is that of "choice," a belief in "doing one's thing" that relegates work to an evil necessary to supply money for food, shelter, drugs, and other comforts.35 Significantly, as a result of this work ethic, members of the hippie culture regard most highly those who for one reason or another do not have to work at all; those who, if they are employed, work at those occupations that demand least of them; and those who engage in creative occupa-tions that spread happiness, including the selling of drugs.

Just as the Blumer report was able to give insight into the drug use of poor Negroes and Mexican-Americans by dividing their culture into two basic patterns of behavior, the rowdy and the cool, the basic distinction usually drawn to give insight to the study of the hippie culture is between the "heads" and the "freaks." According to Dr. Fred Davis, the head uses drugs "for the purpose of mind expansion, insight and the enhancement of personality attributes," i.e., he uses drugs to discover where "his head is at."36 On the other hand, the freak is "in search of drug kicks as such, especially if his craving carries him to the point of drug abuse where his health, sanity and relations with intimates are jeopar-dized."37 In the hippie drug cultures there tends to be at any one time a continuum that involves not only those who fall clearly into one pattern or the other but also large numbers of those who oc-cupy varying in-between positions. Typically, the heads use LSD as a drug of choice, while the freaks use methamphetamines, though most members of each group have tried the other's favorite drug at least once. And, of course, both groups, almost without excep-tion, use marijuana recreationally between their bouts of serious drug taking. Moreover, whether a new recruit to the drug culture becomes a head or a freak depends in great part upon two factors. First, it depends upon his personal characteristics—by and large the heads are better educated, more likely to be middle class, and less likely to have previously been delinquent than the freaks; second, there is also a strong element of chance in the process. As pointed out by Fred Davis,

it became largely a matter of sheer fortuitousness whether a novice hippie turned to "acid" or "speed," to some other drug or a com-bination of several. Whose "pad" he "crashed" on arrival or who befriended him the first time he set foot on High Street could have as much to do with his subsequent pattern of drug use as anything else. This was conspicuously so in the instance of younger recruits, many of them runaways from home in the 14-17 age group.38

The milieu of the drug culture is changing relatively rapidly, and hence its recent tendency to become more violent has not yet received careful scrutiny. Some of this violence, at least in the Haight-Ashbury and probably in most similar drug cultures as well, is no doubt a direct consequence of a greatly increased per-centage of freaks. According to at least one theory, however, that of Roger Smith, one of the authors of the Blumer report and thereafter director of the Amphetamine Research Project, in San Francisco, the relation between the violent nature of the com-munity and its proportion of freaks is quite a complex one.39 Not only does methamphetamine, the freaks' drug of choice, stimulate both paranoia and aggression, but freaks, by and large, are much more likely than heads to need money. First, they tend to come from less wealthy families; second, they tend to be less able to hold down jobs both because of their drug use and other psychological problems and because of their lower educational level; and, third, unlike the heroin addict who often can support his habit and make a living through burglary and other petty crimes, the typical freak has grown up in a much more law-abiding atmosphere and lacks these "street skills." And, even if he should have developed such skills, his personal appearance and generally drug-induced unre-liability are such that no rational fence would trust him enough to redeem the proceeds of his thefts.

As a result, the main occupation of the freaks, along with selling drugs, is to attempt to commit the less sophisticated forms of theft such as armed robbery. For a number of reasons, how-ever, including their appearance and the fact that they cannot drive automobiles in their drugged condition, they have to restrict their predations to their own areas and hence primarily to the members of the drug culture there. Not only does this type of violence breed retaliatory violence, but it also attracts the "motorcycle types," including the most violent "street commandos" (who are motorcyclists in every way except for the fact that they lack motorcycles).

The examination of the various life-styles in this type of drug culture may well leave one with a conviction that anything that promotes recruitment into such a milieu is socially harmful far beyond any increase it causes in the consumption of dangerous drugs. The relationship between marijuana and recruitment into this type of drug culture, however, is far from obvious. First of all, a large number of recruits to the major hippie drug cultures travel considerable distances to settle there. With respect to these, it is hard to see that marijuana can have played much of a part. To the contrary, studies indicate that these recruits are often not so much being attracted by the drug culture as fleeing a family situation that, for far more basic reasons, they find intolerable. And insofar as they are attracted by the drug culture, they are at-tracted by what they have heard (often very wrongly) of the life-style, the sexual permissiveness, and the freedom to disport their alienation, far more than by the free availability of drugs. Nor should this be too surprising when one considers that while mari-juana is certainly more freely obtainable in the hippie drug cul-ture, it is to a great extent sufficiently obtainable in the areas from which the recruits to the drug culture come.

Moreover, even to the extent that young people come to the drug culture for the purpose of using marijuana, the place of marijuana, as distinguished from its criminalization, in this process would be unclear. If the drug culture attracts those who wish to use marijuana more easily and safely, it would seem that the laws that make use unsafe elsewhere are at least as much a cause as marijuana itself. Finally, insofar as recruits come for the purpose of using the dangerous drugs, any postulated implication of marijuana merely assumes the very issue we are attempting to decide—whether marijuana has caused the use of the dangerous drugs.

Even if one concedes, however, that the bulk of the recruits who come from considerable distances to settle down in the drug culture are not influenced in making the move by their having first used marijuana, it might be alleged that marijuana provides gradual entry into the hippie culture for those who live physically near the areas where the hippie culture is established but who, at least initially, have no intention of joining the drug culture. There is support for this view. Several studies indicate that some "recrea-tional" users of marijuana and many members of the campus drug cultures maintain close contacts in the hippie drug culture, and some of them are eventually absorbed into it.4° Again, however, the criminalization of marijuana seems to be instrumental in the process.

A high percentage of the members of the hippie drug culture support themselves—or at least add to their incomes—by dealing in LSD, amphetamines, and marijuana. And although marijuana is apparently not the most profitable commodity, it is probably the major item of commerce outside this drug culture. Typically, however, the small-scale selling of marijuana to recreational users (who greatly outnumber the members of the drug culturej is done not by the members of the hippie drug culture, but either by other recreational users or by members of the campus drug culture. Ac-cording to the most complete study of one particular drug culture, that by Professor James Carey of the Berkeley "drug scene," the most significant step in the progression from being a user who maintains his drug use so that it does not interfere with his normal life—often as a student—to becoming a member of the drug culture, occurs when he begins selling drugs.41 Then, to make sure of his supply for resale, he will spend larger amounts of time in the areas frequented by the hippie drug culture; while waiting for "deals" to be consummated, he will have to spend a great deal of time sitting around and talking to members of the culture, and as a sort of protective coloration, he will begin to dress and act more like them. Moreover, "on the outside" he finds that dealing in drugs, most typically in small amounts of marijuana, takes more and more of his time and effort, until he is forced to choose between the drug culture and the continuance of his more con-ventional life. At this point he may give up dealing in drugs completely or else throw himself fully into the life-style of the drug culture, including, of course, its heavy use of more dan-gerous drugs.

Though statistical support for Professor Carey's observation is not great, Goode's sample of heavy marijuana-users provides some verification of the significance of marijuana selling in multiple drug use.

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This process of assimilation into the drug culture through sale of marijuana has profound implications that extend beyond the seller himself. Typically he will have a circle of friends among the recreational users. And, though his movement into the drug culture is attended by loosening bonds of friendship with those in the "straight world," during the time the process is going on and while he has contacts in both cultures, he will be an ideal contact to sell other higher profit and more dangerous drugs both to members of the campus drug culture and to that fraction of recreational marijuana-users who are vvilling to experiment with them. ,

We could go on at some length listing other plausible mechan-isms that could explain how marijuana use might cause a progres-sion to use of dangerous drugs. In each of these cases it is not merely the use of marijuana but the social context of drug use—in which the criminalization of marijuana plays an essential part—that makes it more likely that those who begin as recreational users of marijuana will become users and promoters of the use of more dangerous drugs. It should be clear, then, that the criminalization of marijuana is as much a cause of the progression to the use of dangerous drugs as is the use of marijuana. In view of this, it is hardly a sensible public policy to criminalize marijuana in the hope of indirectly lowering marijuana use and hence halting the progression. In this case the cure is not only worse than the disease; it is part of the disease.

We have, however, by no means exhausted the issue of whether marijuana use leads to use of other drugs. In the next chapter we will discuss by far the most common charge of this type: the alleged linkage between marijuana and heroin.

Summary

One of the most widely used justifications for the criminalization of marijuana is that use of that drug somehow causes one to use other more dangerous drugs. In this chapter, we have confined our attention to the relation between marijuana and what are called the dangerous drugs—primarily the amphetamines, the barbiturates, and LSD.

Three questions must be answered before the causal relation-ship is proven. First, is there any association between use of marijuana and use of the dangerous drugs? Second, if there is an association, was marijuana used first? Third, if the requisite association and order are found, what is the most reasonable explanation for this?

Statistics show that there is, in fact, a positive correlation be-tween use of any given drug and use of all other drugs—that is, a person who uses one drug more probably will use another. Several studies show specifically that marijuana use correlates 'Very well with use of practically all drugs, dangerous or not and illegal or not.

Granting that there is some association between marijuana use and use of dangerous drugs, the next question is whether or not the marijuana use came first. The answer appears to be that mari-juana is usually, but by no means invariably, the first illegal drug used. It is typically, however, not the first drug used, since before using marijuana, the user of dangerous drugs most likely used alcohol and/or tobacco.

The most important question is the third one, that is, whether or not causation best explains the association between marijuana and dangerous drugs.

Certainly, the fact that there is an association not only be-tween the use of marijuana and that of dangerous drugs, but also between virtually the use of any two drugs, points in the direction of a very different explanation: some people may simply have per-sonalities that predispose them to drug use.

This predisposition hypothesis would explain the correlation between marijuana use and use of other drugs. A person who has a predisposition to take drugs would probably use different drugs in succession until he found one that satisfied his particular disposition. The choice of the order in which to try different drugs would be based on factors such as availability and danger. The most easily available and least dangerous drugs would be used first. 'This explains why marijuana is used before the dangerous drugs, since it is the least dangerous and usually the most available of the illegal drugs.

Having suggested one possible mechanism which could cause the use of dangerous drugs without implicating marijuana as a causal factor, and which is supported by the facts, we now turn to the question of whether or not there is any mechanism by which marijuana use itself might actually cause use of dangerous drugs. One possibility is that marijuana, since it is comparatively safe, serves as an introduction to drug taking for those who would otherwise be afraid to take drugs. To the extent that marijuana use without ill effects lessens the inhibitions against use of more dangerous drugs, it may lead to experimentation with those drugs. There are several problems with using this suggested mechanism as a justification for criminalizing marijuana. First, we do not know that this mechanism actually works. Second, if the mech-anism is based on the idea that many people will try various drugs until they find one that satisfies them, the argument applies equally well to alcohol. Moreover, we are unable to curtail the supply of marijuana enough to have a significant effect on the mechanism, and even if we could, it is entirely possible that those who are now satisfied, or who would be satisfied, by marijuana would then turns to the more dangerous drugs to fulfill their needs.

In short, marijuana use may indeed cause the use of dan-gerous drugs, but the mechanism by which this might occur does not justify criminalizing marijuana. In fact, there are several mechanisms by which the criminalization of that drug may ag-gravate any tendency to cause the use of dangerous drugs. First, the criminalization of marijuana tends to discredit drug-education efforts. Moreover, the criminalization of marijuana dilutes the threat of the criminal sanction in the drug-use area. The mari-juana-user has already committed a serious criminal act. If he is willing to go this far, the law no longer has any power of deterrence, since it is no more, and usually less, criminal to use the dangerous drugs.

Probably the most important mechanism by which the criminalization of marijuana may precipitate use of other drugs is by bringing the marijuana-user into contact with the drug culture. In order to get marijuana the user must buy from a seller who tends to be more involved in the drug culture and to be a source for dangerous drugs as well.

It is therefore true that marijuana in some sense causes at least some of its users to use dangerous drugs. Most of the association between the drugs, however, is better explainable on other grounds-such as predisposition to use drugs. And, insofar as marijuana is a causative agent, the criminalization of the drug is more likely to aggravate than lessen this effect.

NOTES

1. See, e.g., Kalant, O. J., The Amphetamines (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966); Connell, P. H., Amphetamine Psychoses (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).
2. See Nowlis, Helen H., Drugs on the College Campus (Carden City: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 82-85.
3. See e.g., Cohen, Sidney, Drugs of Hallucination (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965).
4. San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 18,1969, p. 5.
5. Blum, Richard H., Students and Drugs (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969), pp. 111-44.
6. Ibid., pp. 102-103.
7. Goode, Erich, "Multiple Drug Use Among Marijuana Smokers," Social Problems, Vol. 17,1969, p. 48.
8. See Haines, Lloyd, and Green, Warren, "Marijuana Use Patterns" (1969), p. 12.
9. Shick, J. F. E., Smith, D. E., and Meyers, F. H., "Use of Marijuana in the Haight-Ashbury Subculture," Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Vol. 2, Fall, 1968, p. 52.
10. Yablonsky, L., The Hippie Trip (New York: Pegasus, 1968), p. 347.
11. Blum, op. cit., p. 137.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 95.
14. Letter from Professor Helen H. Nowlis, Jan. 23,1970.
15. Blum, op. cit., p. 107.
16. Ibid., p. 105.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Smith, Lura, "Drug Commercials on Television" (1969), p. 13 (Table II).
22. Hochberg, Nancy, "A San Francisco Broadcast Audit" (1969), p. 6 (Table I).
23. San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 12,1968, p. 23.
24. Wall Street Journal, Dec. 19,1968, p. 1.
25. Blum, op. cit., pp. 63-81.
26. See Shanahan, P., "An Investigation of the Primrose Path from Marijuana to Methedrine" (1969).
27. Blum, op. cit., p. 136.
28. Testimony of Thomas C. Lynch, Ad Hoc Committee on Danger-ous Drugs, California Congressional Delegation, Friday, Aug. 15, 1969, Los Angeles Federal Office Building, p. 3.
29. Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893-94 (re-printed, Silver Springs, Md.: Thomas Jefferson Publishing Co., 1969), p. 286.
30. Newsweek, Sept. 22,1968, p. 37.
31. "Students' Report: Pot Replacing `Reds' in Schools," San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 21,1970, p. 6.
32. Goode, Erich, The Marijuana Smokers (New York: Basic Books, scheduled for publication in 1970). It should be noted that Pro-fessor Goode himself regards this view as an oversimplification of the process.
33. Garfigkl, Emily, and Boreing, Michael, "Drug Use on a Campus" (1969), p. 15.
34. See Howard S. Becker, "Notes on the Concept of Commitment," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 66,1960, pp. 32-42.
35. Carey, James, The College Drug Scene (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 19.
36. Davis, F., with Munoz, L., "Heads and Freaks: Patterns and Mean-ings of Drug Use Among Hippies," Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 9, No. 2, June, 1968, p. 160.
37. Ibid.
38. Davis, op. cit., p. 162.
39. Letter from Roger Smith, Jan. 23,1969.
40. Carey, op. cit., pp. 122-26.
41. Ibid., pp. 68-69.
42. Goode, "Multiple Drug Use," p. 30 (Table i).

 

Our valuable member John Kaplan has been with us since Sunday, 19 December 2010.

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