From Arthur Sobey
Corpus Christi, Texas
Kurt Kleiner quotes American bureaucrats who must have smoked too much of
what they think others shouldn’t touch (“Turn on, tune in, get well”, 15 March,
p 14).
Health secretary Donna Shalala’s statement that “our teenage drug problem is
for the most part a marijuana problem” is an outright distortion. Some figures
are illustrative. The Monitoring the Future study, done annually by the
University of Michigan, is the government’s “bible” for drug use among
adolescents.
The study for 1996 shows that 4.9 per cent of 12th graders have smoked
marijuana within the last 30 days, 22.2 per cent of 12th graders smoke
cigarettes daily, and 30.2 per cent have engaged in binge drinking of alcohol,
at least once, within the past 14 days. Binge drinking is defined as five or
more drinks or beers in succession, at one sitting. Shalala is well aware of the
facts on alcohol and nicotine, yet continues to insist that marijuana is the
problem.
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The National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA, is no less dishonest. The claims
of memory impairment, brain damage, lung cancer and immune system damage have
all been debunked by research within the past year in the US and Australia.
NIDA’s policy of providing marijuana only to studies aimed at finding negative
effects of marijuana has not been successful.
