HOME / hey, wait a minute: The conventional wisdom debunked.

The Myth of Potent PotThe drug czar's latest reefer madness: He claims that marijuana is 30 times more powerful than it used to be.

By Daniel ForbesPosted Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2002, at 10:33 AM ET

Illustration by Robert Neubecker Marijuana lost big on Election Day. Nevada's pot legalization proposal took only 39 percent of the vote. An Arizona decriminalization initiative did little better with 43 percent. And a mere 33 percent of Ohioans voted for a measure to treat instead of incarcerate minor drug offenders.

RSS

One reason for the ballot-box failure may have been the full-throttle, anti-marijuana campaign tour by White House Drug Czar John P. Walters. Walters, whose official title is director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, inveighed against the demon weed in campaign swings through Ohio, Arizona, and Nevada (twice). At the heart of Walters' sermon: "It is not your father's marijuana." Today's users, he claims, confront pot that's up to 30 times stronger than what aging baby boomers smoked.

In an early September op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Walters wrote: "In 1974, the average THC content of marijuana was less than 1 percent. But by 1999, potency averaged 7 percent." This is plain wrong. According to the federal government's own Potency Monitoring Project at the University of Mississippi, 1999's average was 4.56 percent. Referring to Walters' 7 percent figure, Dr. Mahmoud A. ElSohly, who runs the project, says, "That's not correct for an overall average." (THC is tetra-hydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in pot.)

Walters also wrote that the THC level in "today's sinsemilla … averages 14 percent and ranges as high as 30 percent." (Sinsemilla is the highest-quality pot.) He concluded, "The point is that the potency of available marijuana has not merely 'doubled,' but increased as much as 30 times."

A couple of weeks later in the Detroit News, Walters gave even more alarming numbers about regular pot, claiming that "today's marijuana is 10 to 14 percent [THC]. And hybrids go up to 30 percent and above."

Walters' figures are grossly distorted. For starters, his figures for "today's sinsemilla" actually come from 1999. He ignores data from 2000 and 2001. That's presumably because sinsemilla potency spiked in 1999 at 13.38 percent (which, incidentally, rounds off to 13 percent, not 14 percent). But the most recent full-year figure available, 2001, shows a potency of 9.55 percent. Yes, sinsemilla's THC count has been increasing, but its average over the past decade is only 9.79 percent. More important, the potency of sinsemilla has little to do with quotidian reality for most pot-smokers. Sinsemilla comprises only 4.3 percent of the University of Mississippi's sample over the years. It's prohibitively expensive for casual (and young) users: On the East Coast, the very best stuff is $700 an ounce.

The pot that most people, especially most kids, smoke is nowhere near as powerful as sinsemilla: The THC content of all pot last year was 5.32 percent; during the past decade, it averaged 4.1 percent. In other words, the marijuana that most kids smoke is about 5 percent THC—not 14 percent and certainly not 30 percent.

As to Walters' claim that all those '70s hippies were getting goofy on the 1-percent stuff—the basis for his 30-fold increase claim—the number lacks credibility. No one smokes 1-percent dope, at least not more than once. You make rope with it. The industrial hemp initiative approved by state election officials in South Dakota this year defined psychoactively worthless hemp as a plant with a "THC content of 1 percent or less."

Avowed marijuana enthusiast Keith Stroup, head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, says: "One percent is not smokeable. That's really industrial hemp or ditchweed left over from World War II. All you'll get from that is a headache." In fact, in its formal reports, the Potency Monitoring Project even refers to 1-percent marijuana as "ditchweed." And in Understanding Marijuana, Mitch Earleywine, a University of Southern California psychology professor, writes, "[C]annabis with this little THC has no impact on subjective experience."

Pot is better, just not the 30 times better that Walters cites to scare today's voters. Walters is disingenuously comparing the best pot of today with the worst of yesterday, rather than comparing average marijuana of a generation ago with average marijuana now. He's ginning up the figures he wants by contrasting stuff you might line your cat's litter box with to the alleged 30-percent pot—the likes of which a lucky (or rich) smoker might encounter once every several years.

Nor are Walters' fudged figures consistent from day to day or even consistent with what his own office says. Now he's talking a 30-fold increase, but just last May, Walters wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that pot is "10 to 20 times stronger" than it was a generation ago. (He made his more modest claim before news broke of the legalization push in Nevada and before he started his heavy campaigning.)

ONDCP contradicted the boss's 30-fold nonsense in its own anti-drug media campaign, which features an essay titled, "Kids and Marijuana: The Facts." It states that THC levels "rose from under 2 percent in the late 1970s and early 1980s to just over 6 percent in 2000." (It was actually never under 2 percent in the '80s and was 4.88 percent, not 6 percent, in 2000, but hey—close enough for government work.)

Those minor exaggerations aside, such were "The Facts" when I checked the ONDCP site this fall. But as the campaign season heated up, and Walters' potency claims jumped from 7 percent to October's superpot of 10 percent and 14 percent, these "facts" faded away. The ONDCP essay now states simply: "Today's marijuana is more potent and its effects can be more intense."

The original ONDCP "Facts" correspond with estimates from UCLA professor Mark Kleiman that marijuana has roughly tripled in potency. Kleiman also notes that there is no evidence at all that marijuana is getting kids more stoned than it used to. Writing on his own blog, Kleiman cites the respected annual University of Michigan study that asks respondents about levels of intoxication. Writes Kleiman: "The line for marijuana is flat as a pancake. Kids who get stoned today aren't getting any more stoned than their parents were. That ought to be the end of the argument." Kleiman points out that the average joint is now half its former size, so even if kids are smoking more powerful pot, they are smoking less of it. " 'Not your father's pot' is a great way to convince [boomer parents] to ignore their own experience, personal or vicarious, and believe what they are told to believe."

Of course, the Walters scare campaign is nothing new. Back in 1994, City University of New York professor and marijuana advocate John Morgan cited three New York Times articles warning of alarming increases in marijuana's potency. They were published in 1980, 1986, and 1994.

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Daniel Forbes testified before both the Senate and the House on his series about the Clinton White House's secret payments to the TV networks for airing government-approved anti-drug sitcoms and dramas. Much of his work is archived at www.mapinc.org.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

New to the Fray? Try reading some posts before you post yourself. The Fray works best as a discussion. Try hitching on to a post from a star poster (or one with a check). These authors are likely to check back and respond. Below are some posts that have already opened

Remarks From The Fray:

it's not exactly clear why an increase in THC content is bad. Just because somebody gets higher doesn't mean much. This is the same error many make in distinguishing between beer/wine and package goods. The latter have a much higher alcoholic content, sure, but you can total your car and/or become an alcoholic just as easily on Bud Light as on Smirnoff Vodka. Why do you think they stop serving beer at the ball park after the seventh inning?

-- Slasher

(To reply, click here.)

Taking this a step further - higher THC pot is probably *less* dangerous, in the long run. There is little science to support the notion that the psychoactive ingredient is actually harmful. Rather, it is the smoke itself. Higher THC cigarettes lead to reduced smoking, shorter inhalation, etc.

-- Brian

(To reply, click here.)

If anything, this "high potency pot" argument represents one of the last straws in the old strawman arguments against pot, an almost intellectual white flag. Why? The first reason is that the "potency" argument relies on a disproved premise: that THC is uniquely harmful as a substance.

Truth is, it isn't. To the extent that there are harmful effects, they are so subtle that no credible study (despite millions of dollars spent by an interest police state) can point to any definitive harm. More to the point, twenty to thirty million Americans have undertaken their own personal study of the effect on marijuana. The results of those millions of individual epidemiological studies seem to be a resounding, "Roll me another." So, increasing the percentage of a substance not proven harmful in the first place is hardly persuasive.

-- Doodahman

(To reply, click here.)

A quick scan of this page suggests that all star posters vociferously defend pot. This is one who doesn't.

I'm not in favor of bad science or government lies. Fine, tell the truth (allowing for the fact that few questions actually permit as clean an answer as the polemics here suggest). To me the issue is whether public policy should support--promote--a sober lifestyle, or not. The use of legal prohibition of some or all intoxicating substances is a debatable, but not an irrational, means to consider to that end.

In my work I deal with addicted people every single day. Alcohol is by far the greatest agent, in terms of both numbers of victims and magnitude of damage done. Alcohol is also legal. What this suggests to me is that, if you legalize an intoxicant, you will in effect promote its use.

There are, of course, some laws restricting the legal availability of alcohol. Those laws, at both federal and state levels, are remarkably weak, and are even more weakly enforced. The alcohol control laws in my state were written by a legislator who owned a bar. They are patently, obviously written to favor the alcohol industry and to keep the purported alcohol regulatory agency impotent. That agency employs two enforcement officers to police 4,500 licenses. I have met one of those officers: a semi-retired cop whose attitude is clearly that his is a meaningless job, since he has nothing to work with in terms of budget or staff. This is not a mere coincidence. It is the way the system was intended to work.

Our alcohol laws are kept this way by a liquor industry which spends unbelievable amounts of money on lobbying and to defeat any initative or any candidate even breathing a suggestion of tightening restrictions, increasing the scope of liability, or increasing liquor taxes. One of the very finest legislators this state has had in my time seriously damaged her chances of a gubernatorial run in the future by recently supporting a bill for a very modest increase in liquor taxes--the first in many, many years. She has now been labeled--I have no doubt the liquor industry's lobbyists are behind it--a "kamikaze" candidate, willing to sacrifice election for a principle.

What does this have to do with pot, or any controlled substance? Just this: once an intoxicant becomes legal, you are going to get exactly the same political shit with it that you now have with alcohol. You are going to find you have an immense financial and political power behind increasing demand and decreasing regulation, liability and taxation. Do you really want this? Do you really want a cannabis industry right alongside the liquor industry, one of the most corrupting influences which now operates at local and state levels?

I return to the point I started with: do we, as a society, place a positive value on sobriety? That is, do we adopt it as a valid objective of public policy? Or not? If we do, then those who advocate legalization of marijuana should demonstrate how legalization is consistent with that social objective.

-- Quesnay

(To reply, click here.)

I suppose that Mr. Forbes would dismiss my research, saying the point is that the U.S. Drug Czar has no business lying to children and their parents about the relative potency of the average marijuana on the streets today. If the drug has substantial and incontestable health hazards, it ought to be possible to make a good case against it just on the facts. Ideally, I cannot argue with that principle but there are some factors that suggest a hard line - and perhaps a slightly disingenuous one - may be an evil necessity to keep the youngest kids off the stuff. Quite a few studies agree that children who are introduced to marijuana at age fourteen or younger have a statistically greater chance of becoming heavy users and/or moving onto harder drugs than those who are not exposed until their late teens or early adulthood. Furthermore, all studies agree there is a major disconnect between boomer parents and their kids as to the availability of the drug and the use of it by their kids and kids' friends. The numbers provided by parents were consistently only about half of what the kids themselves were reporting. It appears the generation that championed recreational drug use as a mainstream activity has become as stodgy and disconnected as the parents they were rebelling against.

-- The Bell

(To reply, click here.)

(11/19)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES