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Stupidest Drug Story of the WeekIs Reuters drinking bong water?

By Jack ShaferPosted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 6:46 PM ET

Marijuana smokerWhy don't the hacks who cover the illicit-drug beat just turn their keyboards over to the drug-abuse industrial complex and let them write the stories?

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This week, Reuters moved a story based on a government press release about marijuana potency issued by the Office of National Drug Control Policy—the office of "drug czar" John P. Walters. The press release and the Reuters story state that marijuana potency has reached its highest level since the government started monitoring it in the late 1970s. The average levels of THC in marijuana now stand at 8.5 percent. (THC is the primary active ingredient in marijuana.) This compares to a little less than the 4 percent measured in 1983.

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Earlier in this series, Jack Shafer railed against the stupidity in stories about nicotine, "ultrapot" from Mexico, morning glory seeds, methamphetamine, addiction, "pharm parties," heroin, meth mouth, and mothballs. Yes, mothballs. In 2002, Daniel Forbes took down the czar's claim of ever more potent pot.

Headlined "U.S. Marijuana Even Stronger Than Before: Report" on Reuters' Web site, the piece quotes nobody outside of government as it channels drug warrior hysteria.

As this drug-czar chart shows, the average percentage of THC in cannabis samples analyzed by the ongoing Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project at the University of Mississippi has increased over the years. Assuming for just a moment that these findings accurately reflect marijuana potency, I've got a question: So what?

Back in 2002, when Czar Walters warned of the dangers of stronger pot in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, drug scholar Mark A.R. Kleiman of UCLA responded with this item in his blog:

What matters isn't how strong the material is, but how intoxicated the users get. And there's lots of evidence that marijuana users tend to have a target level of intoxication and learn how to titrate dosage to reach that level. Studies that ask marijuana users to roll a joint have found that the average size has halved, from about half a gram to about a quarter of a gram, and there's anecdotal evidence that sharing a single joint has become more common.

So much for the inherent dangers of superpotent weed.

But how accurate are the government's measurements of average THC? Writer Brian C. Bennett notes that the number of drug samples tested in the government study has varied widely, making meaningful comparisons of increased (or decreased) potency difficult. The collection of samples doesn't appear to be as scientific as it does anecdotal. The czar's press release asserts that two-thirds of the samples analyzed in the most recent study came from law enforcement seizures and purchases, and the rest from domestic eradications.

Bennett writes that the kinds of marijuana seized and tested vary from year to year, also. In 2000, sinsemilla, the extra-potent flowering tops of the marijuana plant, constituted 3.66 percent of the tested samples. In 2004, 18.39 percent of the samples were sinsemilla. Guess which year produced a higher average measure of THC? In 2000, the figure was about 5 percent. In 2004, about 7 percent.

The Reuters article also conveys the views of a National Institute on Drug Abuse official in reporting that "60 percent of teens receiving treatment for drug abuse or dependence report marijuana as their primary drug of abuse." Kleiman's blog puts the treatment numbers in perspective by pointing to the University of Maryland's Center for Substance Abuse Research, which reports (PDF) that the increase in marijuana treatment admission is driven by the increase in criminal justice referrals. Marijuana arrests "have roughly doubled over the past fifteen years," Kleiman writes in his blog, "with the vast bulk of those arrests … for simple possession. Other studies show that for juveniles, most non-criminal-justice referrals reflect parental pressure."