ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 23, 1997 TAG: 9701230028
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: what's on your mind?
SOURCE: RAY REED
Q: It seems the tide of public opinion has turned against tobacco as it has become obvious that smoking poses health problems while imposing much of the costs on the rest of us. Now the issue of legalizing marijuana is before us. Won't smoking marijuana pose the same health risks and medical costs as tobacco (assuming that most marijuana users will inhale)?
C.R., Blacksburg
A: We'd like to say yes. However, there isn't as much proof of marijuana's harmful effects as there is of tobacco's.
It took 40 years of research by scientists to document this simple statement: smoking tobacco causes 400,000 deaths per year in the nation.
Serious marijuana research has been under way about 20 years. There are fewer users and fewer scientists looking at pot. These scientists don't agree on how bad pot is, and there are enough advocates of its use to cloud the issue.
Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services, recently said marijuana harms the brain, heart, lungs and immune system and cited research by scientists around the nation.
Pot use slowed the learning rate in college students for at least a day afterward; children whose mothers used pot during pregnancy had a short attention span and difficulty with learning. (Studies by Dr. Harrison Pope of Belmont, Mass.; Dr. Alan I. Leshner of the National Institutes of Health; Dr. Peter Fried, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.)
Regular pot smokers may have respiratory problems: daily cough and phlegm, chronic bronchitis and more frequent chest colds. Lung tissue has been injured or destroyed by marijuana smoke. These findings were reported in July 1995 by Dr. Donald Tashkin of UCLA, a leading authority on the pulmonary consequences of smoking marijuana.
However, pot advocates on the Web cite a Tashkin study from the 1980s that found pot smoke could sometimes open breathing passages for asthma sufferers.
There's little documentation that smoking marijuana has caused - as tobacco does - a significant number of deaths from lung cancer or heart disease. We don't know what furthur research may find.
Pot can be addictive. That's the conclusion of a study by Dr. Billy R. Martin at the Medical College of Virginia.
Marijuana is intoxicating. It impairs balance and response times, just as alcohol does. (Study by Dr. Stephen Heishman at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.)
The Drug Enforcement Administration has a file on marijuana, which is among the Schedule 1 controlled drugs - the most dangerous category. An administrative law judge within the agency concluded after two years of study that pot should be reclassified as less dangerous so it could be used as a medicine. The agency refused the judge's recommendation, citing positions by the American Medical Association, American Cancer Society and other authorities.
In spite of all these findings, marijuana use is growing among high-school students. A yearly survey by the University of Michigan documented a rise for three straight years through 1994. Fewer students perceived the drug as harmful.
This increase in pot use coincided with the Gulf War, when media attention and public awareness of the war on drugs weakened and never resumed.
Got a question about something that might affect other people, too? Something you've come across and wondered about? Call us at 981-3118. Or, e-mail RayR@Roanoke.Infi.Net. Maybe we can find the answer.
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