HB 2676 - Alcohol Marijuana Equalization - Support

All of the information below, from irrefutable government and local sources, points to the facts: that marijuana is safer than alcohol. With this in mind, adult marijuana possession should be regulated in a fashion similar to adult alcohol possession. This bill allows for marijuana to be treated just like alcohol for adult posession. Two years after this bill goes into effect, the State of Hawai'i Legislature shall form a committee to study the effectiveness of this bill, and issue a recommendation whether marijuana production and sales shall be treated the same as beer and wine.


source: Jack E. Henningfield, PhD for NIDA, Reported by Philip J. Hilts, New York Times, Aug. 2, 1994 "Is Nicotine Addictive? It Depends on Whose Criteria You Use."

Withdrawal: Presence and severity of characteristic withdrawal symptoms. Reinforcement: A measure of the substance's ability, in human and animal tests, to get users to take it again and again, and in preference to other substances.
Tolerance: How much of the substance is needed to satisfy increasing cravings for it, and the level of stable need that is eventually reached.
Dependence: How difficult it is for the user to quit, the relapse rate, the percentage of people who eventually become dependent, the rating users give their own need for the substance and the degree to which the substance will be used in the face of evidence that it causes harm.
Intoxication: Though not usually counted as a measure of addiction in itself, the level of intoxication is associated with addiction and increases the personal and social damage a substance may do.

2. Deaths from the two substances. There are hundreds of alcohol overdose deaths each year, yet there has never been a marijuana overdose death in history. The consumption of alcohol is also the direct cause of tens of thousands of death in the U.S. each year.

"In 2001, there were 331 alcohol overdose deaths and 0 marijuana overdose deaths."

Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5337a2.htm. "Excessive alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States and is associated with multiple adverse health consequences, including liver cirrhosis, various cancers, unintentional injuries, and violence." -- The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported 20,687 "alcohol-induced deaths" (excluding accidents and homicides) in 2003. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/alcohol.htm
The CDC has "no reports of marijuana-induced deaths."

3. Alcohol is one of the most toxic drugs, and using just 10 times what one would use to get the desired effect can lead to death. Marijuana is one of - if not the - least toxic drugs, requiring thousands times the dose one would use to get the desired effect to lead to death. This "thousands times" is actually theoretical, since there has never been a recorded case of marijuana overdose.

"The most toxic recreational drugs, such as GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) and heroin, have a lethal dose less than 10 times their typical effective dose. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, often called "ecstasy") and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or "roofies") and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. I've found no published cases in the English language that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. My surmise is that smoking marijuana is more risky than eating it but still safer than getting drunk."

Source: The American Scientist, the Magazine of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

"Alcohol and tobacco kill more than 50 times the number of people killed by cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and every other illegal drug combined." -- Coalition for a Drug Free Hawai'i.

4. Long-term marijuana use is far less harmful than long-term alcohol use. There is little evidence, however, that long-term cannabis use causes permanent cognitive impairment, nor is there is any clear cause and effect relationship to explain the psychosocial associations.

There are some physical health risks, particularly the possibility of damage to the airways in cannabis smokers. Overall, by comparison with other drugs used mainly for 'recreational' purposes, cannabis could be rated to be a relatively safe drug.

Source: Iversen, Leslie. Current Opinion in Pharmacology. Volume 5, Issue 1, February 2005, Pages 69-72. Long-term effects of exposure to cannabis. University of Oxford, Department of Pharmacology.

5. The UK Science and Technology Select Committee considers alcohol far more harmful than marijuana.

The committee commissioned an assessment of 20 legal and illegal stimulants in order to bring some logic to the country's drug classification. Based on this study, they made recommendations to the government, including a recommendation that alcohol be considered among the most harmful drugs. Cannabis was considered significantly less harmful. Cannabis was recently rescheduled in the UK and is now a Class C substance (with A being the most harmful).

Source: New Scientist Magazine. Issue 2563. August 2006, page 5. Drug-danger 'league table' revealed.

Britain: Pot Use Drops Following Drug's Reclassification - Illicit drug use hits record low after cops cease arresting minor pot violators
London, UK

London, United Kingdom: Self-reported cannabis use among Britons has declined sharply in the three years following the government's decision to downgrade pot possession to a non-arrestable offense, according to figures compiled by the Home Office's annual Crime Survey.

The Home Office statistics show that marijuana use by young people age 16 to 24 has fallen approximately 20 percent since 2004. Overall, 21 percent of young people admit having tried pot, with eight percent of young people saying that they've used it in the past month. By contrast, more than twice this percentage of Americans age 18 to 25 say that they've used pot during the past 30 days, according to 2006 data reported by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA).

Among all age groups, only eight percent of Britons say they've used cannabis in the past year. Ten percent of the population said that they had used at least one illicit drug over the past year - the lowest percentage ever recorded by the British Crime Survey.

In July, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called on lawmakers to increase marijuana penalties by rescheduling cannabis from a Class C to a Class B controlled substance. At that time, Brown claimed that downgrading pot's legal status in 2004 had led to a significant increase in the drug's use.

Under reclassification, police have the discretion to verbally warn - rather than arrest - adults found with small amounts of pot. Since the enactment of the policy, police seizures of cannabis have increased sharply, though the total number of citizens' arrested for pot-related violations has fallen.

"A far smaller percentage of young people smoke cannabis in the United Kingdom than in America - despite Britain's enactment of far more liberal pot policies," NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre said. "The Gordon Brown government would be taking a drastic step backwards by reverting to the sort of US-styled 'Do drugs, do time' mentality that has resulted in making America the world's leader in illicit drug use and in the incarceration of its citizens for non-violent drug violations."

6. There has never been a documented case of lung cancer in a marijuana-only smoker, and recent studies find that marijuana use is not associated with any type of cancer.

The same cannot be said for alcohol, which has been found to contribute to a variety of long-term negative health effects, including cancers and cirrhosis of the liver.

It is interesting to note in the chart the difference between what people usually consider the most likely serious harms associated with marijuana and alcohol. While there has never been a documented case of lung cancer in a marijuana-only smoker, there are clearly thousands of deaths by liver disease directly associated with alcohol - 12,360 in 2003, to be exact.

Source: The CDC see:http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/alcohol.htm. Note also on this page that "alcoholic liver disease" is a separate category from "alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides." Thus the 20,687 cited in #2 (as "deaths from alcohol consumption" could easily be 33,047.

Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 26, 2006
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer. The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.

Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.

Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex and neighborhood.

They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied.

"This is the largest case-control study ever done, and everyone had to fill out a very extensive questionnaire about marijuana use," he said. "Bias can creep into any research, but we controlled for as many confounding factors as we could, and so I believe these results have real meaning."

Tashkin's group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had hypothesized that marijuana would raise the risk of cancer on the basis of earlier small human studies, lab studies of animals, and the fact that marijuana users inhale more deeply and generally hold smoke in their lungs longer than tobacco smokers -- exposing them to the dangerous chemicals for a longer time. In addition, Tashkin said, previous studies found that marijuana tar has 50 percent higher concentrations of chemicals linked to cancer than tobacco cigarette tar.

While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.

The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older than that were generally not exposed to marijuana in their youth, when it is most often tried.

7. Studies find alcohol use contributes to the likelihood of domestic violence and sexual assault and marijuana use does not.

"Of the psychoactive substances examined, among individuals who were chronic partner abusers, the use of alcohol and cocaine was associated with significant increases in the daily likelihood of male-to-female physical aggression; cannabis and opiates were not significantly associated with an increased likelihood of male partner violence.

... The odds of severe male-to-female physical aggression were more than 11 times (higher on days of men's drinking than on days of no drinking. Moreover, in both samples, over 60% of all episodes occurred within 2 hours of drinking by the male partner." (page 1557)

Source: Fals-Stewart , William, James Golden, Julie A. Schumacher. Journal of Addictive Behaviors. 28, pages 1555-1574. Intimate partner violence and substance use: A longitudinal day-to-day examination. Research Institute on Addictions, University at Buffalo, State University of New York

8. Studies find alcohol use contributes to aggressive behavior and acts of violence, whereas marijuana use reduces the likelihood of violent behavior.

"Alcohol is clearly the drug with the most evidence to support a direct intoxication-violence relationship. Cannabis reduces likelihood of violence during intoxication..."


Source: Hoaken, Peter N.S., Sherry H. Stewart. Journal of Addictive Behaviors. 28, pages 1533-1554. Drugs of abuse and the elicitation of human aggressive behavior. Dept. of Psychology, University of Western Ontario. Dept. of of Psychiatry, DalhousieUniversity.

9. Alcohol use is highly associated with violent crime, whereas marijuana use is not.

About 3 million violent crimes occur each year in which victims perceive the offender to have been drinking at the time of the offense. Two-thirds of victims who suffered violence by an intimate (a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend) reported that alcohol had been a factor.
Among spouse victims, 3 out of 4 incidents were reported to have involved an offender who had been drinking.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. National Crime Victimization Survey 2002.

10. Alcohol use is prevalent in cases of sexual assault and date rape on college campuses. Marijuana use is not considered a contributing factor in cases of sexual assault and date rape, as judged by the lack of discussion of marijuana in sexual assault and date rape educational materials.

A Harvard School of Public Heath study found that 72 percent of college rapes occurred when the female was too intoxicated by alcohol to resist/consent.

Comparisons between alcohol and marijuana with respect to sexual assault are very difficult. This is because it does not appear as if marijuana is a significant contributing factor. The best was to "prove" this is through observation that many organizations dedicated to studying and educating about sexual assault do not list marijuana as substance associated with incidents. Note the description of alcohol from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network: "Alcohol is the most commonly used chemical in drug facilitated sexual assault. In large part this is due to the fact that alcohol is easily accessible and a chemical that many people use in social interactions." Given the fact that marijuana is also "easily accessible" and used widely in "social interactions," it is quite telling that marijuana is not even listed at all on this "Drug Facilitated Assault" page.

Source: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cas/Documents/rapeintox-pressRelease/ Another example: A Web site sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Health (http://www.4woman.gov/faq/rohypnol.htm#5) and Human Services list alcohol, but not marijuana, as "putting a person at risk for unwanted or risky sexual activity."