For
Arizonans who have spent their lives and careers seeking positive
outcomes for our children’s health, education and welfare, E.J.
Montini’s column, “Marijuana initiative slyly spreads like weed,” must
have come as quite a shock.
In arguing for an initiative to
legalize marijuana, Montini’s source came from a pro-marijuana lobbyist:
broadcasting several errors of fact and logic.
The lobbyist stated that those opposed
to legalizing marijuana use one tool, “fear.” Indeed there is a great
deal to fear from making a dangerous drug like marijuana more available,
but that fear is actually based on scientific and medical fact.
There is a reason, after all, the
American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the
American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Neurology and
the American Society of Addiction Medicine oppose legalizing marijuana
for recreational use. When it comes to making a dangerous drug more
available, we would recommend listening to doctors, not lobbyists.
The New England Journal of Medicine
found last year adverse effects of just short term marijuana use include
“impaired short-term memory,” “impaired motor coordination,” “altered
judgment” and, in high doses, “paranoia and psychosis.” Long-term use
effects include “addiction” and “cognitive impairment.” All of this is
especially consequential to the teen and adolescent user’s brain.
But, Montini and the lobbyist tell us,
marijuana is safer than alcohol. Nobody in responsible substance abuse
prevention talks this way. Just ask the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. In
her experiment she passed up her usual chardonnay for a bite or two of a
marijuana candy bar. She felt as if she “had died” when she went into
“a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours.”
The study quoted by the legalization
lobby for its odd point that one dangerous substance is safer than
another also claims cocaine and meth to be safer than alcohol. Perhaps
those should be legal too?
Interestingly, the Campaign to Regulate
Marijuana Like Alcohol features supporters who do believe that. The
campaign to legalize is not just about marijuana after all — not given
their supporters, not given the studies they cite.
Research shows dangers from youth use
of marijuana are well-documented. One should also look at the increased
hospital admissions and poison control calls in marijuana legalization
states where youth accidental ingestion includes such symptoms as
difficulty breathing, elevated heart rate, confusion and disorientation,
anxiety attacks, and loss of motor facility.
And yes, we do fear what the journal
Clinical Pediatrics just found: In states with marijuana-friendly
legislation, there has been a 609 percent increase in accidental
childhood marijuana ingestion. Finally, the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services revealed: Colorado teen marijuana use is now 73
percent higher than the rest of the nation.
In the end, we find it odd that
Montini would cite a poll from a year ago to prove his point that
marijuana legalization is inevitable when December’s ASU/Morrison
Institute poll found legalization in Arizona faces “likely defeat.” Of
course, the vote in Ohio last year is also more instructive than last
year’s poll: legalization was defeated by nearly 30 points there.
Currently, less than 10 percent of the states have legalized marijuana.
This simply is not anywhere near proof that “opponents have lost,” as
Mr. Montini writes.
The truth: Arizona’s youth use the
legal substance alcohol at a rate 77 percent higher than they use the
illegal substance marijuana. To make marijuana like alcohol, as the
lobbyists’ desire, is to take a low-use and dangerous substance and turn
it into another high-use and dangerous substance. It would also
radically overturn decades of hard work in the substance abuse
prevention, health, education, welfare, and law enforcement fields.
Arizonans shouldn’t want this. Nobody should.
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