HOME / press box: Media criticism.

Stupidest Drug Story of the WeekIs Reuters drinking bong water?

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

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

Related in Slate

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.

None of this is to champion the use of marijuana. I just want journalists to stop regurgitating whatever the drug warriors tell them. Bennett catalogs some of the most ridiculous claims about marijuana potency made by officials and published in the press during the last 40 years. If you take these statements at face value, a single joint rolled from today's marijuana should carry a bigger punch than several tons of yesteryear's Mexican grass.

Addendum, April 29: Via e-mail, I asked Mark Kleiman if his views on potency and potency reports had changed since he wrote his blog item. After I filed my piece, he responded:

In the real world, THC content seems to be continuing to drift up, though I wouldn't take the Mississippi pot farm's unsupported word for it.
In our knowledge, the idea that THC content is the be-all and end-all of cannabis potency now seems to be discredited. The work by GW Pharmaceuticals suggests that the ratios of THC to cannabidiol matters, with high-ratio stuff more likely to generate problematic levels of anxiety. (Cannabidiol seems to be anxiolytic.)
Users can titrate (though of course not perfectly) to avoid getting "too stoned" from more potent pot. But if there's less cannabidiol per milligram of THC, it's more likely that the amount of pot they have to smoke to get as high as they want to get will produce a panic reaction.
My understanding is that hashish, which generally has a higher concentration of THC than unprocessed cannabis, also has lots of CBD and thus a low THC/CBD ratio. Therefore the "Indica" cannabis that increasingly dominates the market is actually more likely to generate bad reactions than is hashish.
It seems to me that the bad faith of the anti-cannabis forces is showing. If the illicit market is creating dangerously potent (or, I would say, high THC/CBD ratio) cannabis, that's an argument for creating a legal market where the potency and the ratio can be known to the user and regulated by the government. There's no particular reason either buyers or sellers in a licit cannabis market should favor especially potent pot, any more than 150-proof rum has a big share of the alcohol market.

******

I've never smoked marijuana and I don't advocate its use. For compelling health reasons, kids should avoid it, and many seem to do just that. According to a Monitoring the Future study, the number of high-school pot smokers remains flat or down over the last decade. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)