The War Against Pot

Jacob Sullum has a nice piece in Reason about the government's propaganda against marijuana. Since nobody who has any first-hand (or second-hand!) experience with weed actually believes that it's the sort of thing the ought to be eradicated while its users are put into prison, the government, natch, resorts to outrageous lies in order to drum up anti-weed hysteria. (Too bad marijuana doesn't have a powerful lobby behind it---like, you know, that dangerous addictive drug Oxycontin.) How does the government lie? Sullum explains:

Either the marijuana people smoked in the 1960s and '70s was not psychoactive at all, and its perceived effects were a mass delusion, or someone is exaggerating. Otherwise, we'd have to believe that the level of THC (marijuana's main active ingredient) in today's pot exceeds 100 percent.

In fact, the ONDCP says the current average is something like 7 percent, up from 3.5 percent in 1985, based on analyses of marijuana seized by federal agents. But seizures are not necessarily a representative sample, and if the focus of anti-pot efforts has shifted in the last two decades, the 1985 data may not be comparable to more recent measurements.

Still, marijuana probably is somewhat more potent, on average, than it used to be, because growers have gotten better at producing high-quality cannabis. Contrary to what the government says, however, there's little reason to believe stronger pot is worse for you. If anything, it's healthier, since people smoke less of it to achieve the effect they want.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy claims that weed is 40 times more potent than it was 20 years ago. Just assuming that their 7% THC figure is correct, that would mean that marijuana in the 60s and 70s was less than .175% THC. Right.