Myths about marijuana abound. Among them are claims that it's harmless, it's not addictive and that legalizing it will solve the government's budgetary problems, said U.S. Rep. John Fleming, MD, at a June 19 congressional briefing. "My concern today is, are we making bad laws to, in fact, respond to mythology?"
The briefing was sponsored by APA and other members of The Friends of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a coalition that advocates for research funding for NIDA and educates policymakers about its findings. This event sought to dispel myths about marijuana and outline what is known about its use and its societal impact. For example, 9 percent of people who experiment with marijuana will become addicted, and regular marijuana use in adolescence is linked to impaired neural connectivity in adulthood, according to a June review article in the New England Journal of Medicineopens in new window.
"It's the exposure of adolescent brains [to marijuana] that concerns all of us because of the unique and important nature of brain development during teen years," said Wilson Compton, MD, the deputy director of NIDA and a co-author of the article.
The briefing featured psychologist Robert Booth, PhD, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who presented his preliminary findings on marijuana use and its consequences. So far, he's found that since Colorado started implementing its medical marijuana laws fully in 2009, the number of students expelled or suspended for drugs in Colorado schools each year has gone up from about 4,000 to more than 5,279 during the 2011–12 school year.
"Colorado is at an all-time high in terms of [drug-related] expulsions, and 98 percent of these expulsions are for marijuana," Booth said. Similarly, the number of people arrested for driving under the influence of THC, the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana, nearly tripled from 2009 to 2012, he said.
Patrick Kennedy, a former U.S. congressman and chairman of the marijuana awareness organization Project SAMopens in new window, spoke about the danger of commercializing marijuana products such as lollipops and sodas. "This is really an industry that makes its profits off of addiction," he said. Kennedy and other speakers also stressed that widespread distribution of marijuana may counter efforts to improve the country's mental health system by encouraging people to self-medicate with marijuana or to become addicted to it.
All speakers agreed that more research is needed to understand the effects of marijuana and inform policy. "Policy is all about making decisions, and those decisions have to be made based on real information, solid information," said Charles O'Keefe, co-chair of The Friends of NIDA and a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "And solid information comes from good, solid research."
— Anna Miller
