Congressman Kirk, Your Hypocrisy is Showing

by

Bruce Mirken

With great fanfare, Congressman Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) recently introduced legislation to massively increase penalties for producers and sellers of higher-potency marijuana. It’s hard to know what’s worse about this proposal, the scientific ignorance behind it or the congressman’s blatant hypocrisy.

Kirk’s proposal would raise the penalties for growing even one marijuana plant to as high as 25 years in federal prison (more than the penalty selling for three and half ounces of heroin or more than a pound of cocaine) if it contains 15 percent or more THC , the component responsible for the "high". In announcing the bill, Kirk said he thought the penalty for selling such potent marijuana should be comparable to that for cocaine, apparently not noticing that his proposed penalty for one plant is harsher than the penalty for someone selling over a pound of coke.

From a scientific perspective, this is laughable. Unlike cocaine, THC is for all practical purposes non-toxic. It is literally impossible to fatally overdose on even the highest-strength marijuana.

And scientific experts remain unconvinced that higher-THC marijuana is any more dangerous than the lower-potency stuff. A review of the issue published last year by the journal Addiction noted that warnings about escalating marijuana potency date back to at least 1975, and that the evidence for claims of major increases in potency is "fragmented and fraught with methodological errors." The researchers concluded that "more research is needed to determine whether increased potency and contamination translates to harm for users."

Also last year, the British government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs reached a similar conclusion in a report to the Prime Minister. Both groups of experts pointed to evidence that when marijuana is more potent, users simply smoke less. For example, the British experts wrote:

"A parallel can be drawn between the use of high-strength cannabis and the consumption of alcohol. The public health consequences of alcohol use are not a simple function of the strength of the beverage. Rather… it is the total quantity of alcohol that is consumed."

And, as an Australian government report noted a few years ago, much of the research showing marijuana to be comparatively harmless was done on individuals consuming very large amounts of THC.

No one would claim with a straight face that bourbon or vodka is "a whole different drug" than beer, even though they have eight or nine times the alcohol content. People drinking vodka simply drink less than if they’re drinking beer. Yet Kirk wants us to believe that marijuana is somehow magically different.

The scientific fact — as verified by a comparison published in another prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet — is that marijuana of any strength is a far safer "recreational" substance than either tobacco or alcohol. It’s much less addictive and massively less toxic. Compared to alcohol, it’s orders of magnitude less likely to provoke violent or aggressive behavior — the heart of most social problems associated with booze.

And that’s where Congressman Kirk’s hypocrisy comes in. You see, over the years, he’s raked in thousands of dollars of campaign cash from the tobacco and alcohol industries, including Altria — the company that owns Philip Morris, America’s leading cigarette peddler — and the National Beer Wholesalers Association.

So, while he happily takes in campaign money from companies that promote truly dangerous and addictive drugs, Congressman Kirk engages in empty political posturing about a nonexistent threat from high-strength marijuana. If they gave awards for hypocrisy in government, Rep. Kirk would be a shoo-in.
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Bruce Mirken, a longtime health journalist, now serves as director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, www.mpp.org