Chronicle Book Review: Reefer Sanity: Seven Great Myths About Marijuana by Kevin Sabet (2013, Beaufort Books, 198 pp., $14.95 PB)
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Now, Sabet has organized and expanded his arguments in book form, and people interested in changing the marijuana laws will be seriously remiss if they fail to read, understand, and address them. Not because they are necessarily correct, but because Sabet is this generation's gentler, kinder voice of marijuana prohibition. The arguments Sabet makes in Reefer Sanity are sure to be used as ammunition by the foes of reform; count on them being echoed across the land as the debate spreads from state to state.
The important thing to know about Sabet is that he generally approaches marijuana policy from a public health perspective. For him, policy is about preventing marijuana use in the first place and then reducing the harms of its use (see below) when prevention fails. Yes, he still wants to arrest you, but only for the kinder, gentler reason of getting you into forced drug treatment.
But his focus on harms exposes a curious lacuna in his thinking: he never addresses the benefits of smoking marijuana, or drinking booze, or whatever other drug is in question. An argument that says only that X number of teen potheads will go schizophrenic or that X number of marijuana users will get in car wrecks or that marijuana use will cost X dollars in increased health care costs, but that fails to note that 1000X pot smokers will endure sweet moments of bliss, hilarity, and camaraderie is an argument with half the equation missing.
Yes, we have a certain number of alcoholics. We also have tens of millions of people who derive pleasure from sipping a fine California cabernet sauvignon with dinner or enjoying a cold, cold beer during a hot summer ball game. And even someone beginning his day with a cup of coffee and a cigarette (addictive substances both) derives some small pleasure from doing so. It's hard to put a dollar figure on such positives, and even harder when you don't even consider them.
Before getting into specifics, my other major problem with Sabet's approach is his willingness to use the coercive power of the state to make us conform to his vision of the public health. As Ethan Nadelmann is fond of putting it, "absent harm to others" the state should just butt out. Sabet doesn't want people thrown in prison or jail for marijuana; he wants them thrown in coerced treatment. He doesn't want people to suffer the life-long consequences of a marijuana arrest; he just wants to arrest them to "help" them. (Sabet would like to see marijuana possession arrest records disappear so as to not hurt one's future chances, but he still wants to arrest you for your own good.)
This is the danger when the nice-sound label "public health approach" gets stuck onto what is really still a criminal justice approach, with what is arguably a public health component tacked on. We trade cops, arrest, and imprisonment for cops, arrest, and treatment. But we still have the cops and we still have the arrests, and with the treatment component, we get extended surveillance and control by the state. There is a really human liberty interest here of which those, like Sabet, who can only conceive of drug use in terms of human slavery, are almost totally blind.
Sabet constructs his book around "Seven Great Myths About Marijuana." Here they are, with my briefest of responses. (I'm counting on the rest of you out there to do the detailed responding to his arguments; I'll limit myself to general comments here.)
Myth #1: Marijuana is Harmless and Non-Addictive. I don't know too many serious reformers who would make this argument, but they would say that its harms in most cases are minimal and that it's addictive in the same sense that a substance like coffee is addictive. And the dreaded withdrawal syndrome is about as horrendous as going off coffee. Not to mention that there are many people Sabet would qualify as "marijuana addicts" who nonetheless manage to lead happy, productive, creative lives.
Myth #2: Smoked or Eaten Marijuana is Medicine. What I find interesting about this section is the way it illuminates a growing divide between people who believe only in standardized, pharmaceuticalized Western medicine and people more inclined to accept naturalistic remedies. For Sabet, if it ain't a pill manufactured by a drug company, it ain't medicine. For medical marijuana supporters (and many others), however, the wonders of pills, with all their toxicities and other side effects, leave something to be desired. A nice hit of high-CBD weed or a cup of poppy tea work quite well, and they're not going to destroy your liver or make your hair fall out or cause impotence or any of those other litanies of side effects we're treated to in those drug company TV ads.
Myth #3: Countless People Are Behind Bars Simply for Smoking Marijuana. No responsible reformer believes that. It is an argument that I see frequently being made by well-intentioned but ill-informed people, but, as Sabet demonstrates, it just isn't so and the drug reform community has understood that for some time now. The collateral consequences of a pot arrest are a different story. Sabet would like to minimize arrest records to reduce those consequences, but he still wants to arrest you so the state can get its claws into you.
Myth #4: The Legality of Alcohol and Tobacco Strengthen the Case for Legal Marijuana. Here, Sabet argues that the costs of legal alcohol and tobacco far exceed the benefits, and that legalization of marijuana will increase use and its attendant harms. But he elides the qualitative differences in the harms of the three substances. Is more marijuana use going to cause more bar fights, domestic abuse, and drunken brawls? Not likely. Is more marijuana use going to cause more schizophrenia or lung cancer? Well, we've had nearly a half-century of pot-smoking cohorts and have yet to see associated increases in those illnesses. But bottom line, it's a matter of fundamental fairness: How can you justify criminalizing people for using a substance less harmful than legal substances like alcohol and tobacco?
Myth #5: Legal Marijuana Will Solve the Government's Budgetary Problems. Sabet suggests that tax revenues from legal weed will be lesser than expected because of tax evasion and falling prices and that legalization will bring its own costs, such as paying for a regulatory framework. How true this is remains to be seen, but like many of his other "myths," this is in large part a straw man argument. I hear serious reformers saying marijuana tax revenues will help, not that they will be a panacea.
Myth #6: Portugal and Holland Provide Successful Models of Legalization. Sabet points out, accurately enough, that neither Portugal nor Holland have actually legalized marijuana; Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs, and Holland tolerates controlled sales and possession of small amounts. He points to mixed results from Portugal and to recent moves from conservative Dutch governments to try to rein in the cannabis coffee shops, but fails to note the strong resistance in Holland. He also points to increasing Dutch teen marijuana use, but fails to note that it is well within European norms. He also fails to note the consistent finding from social scientists that the link between drug policies and drug use rates is quite weak.
Myth #7: Prevention, Intervention, and Treatment are Doomed to Fail -- So Why Try? Prevention efforts can reduce use rates and some forms of drug treatment show more promise than others. Okay. I'm all for treatment for people who want and need it. But Sabet seems to assume that anyone who smokes marijuana needs treatment, and he's willing to see you arrested, sent to drug court or its equivalent, and placed under extended surveillance by the state to get his druthers. Also, typically, he points to high numbers of marijuana users in treatment without noting that a majority of them are sent there by the courts, the schools, or other authority figures after getting busted -- not because they are "marijuana addicts."
Get familiar with these arguments and how to respond to them. Pull apart those straw men. Find those fallacies. Examine those underlying assumptions. You're going to be hearing a lot of arguments just like these in the months and years to come. Part of how effectively we move forward on ending the drug war depends on how effectively we rebut its slickest proponents. And Kevin Sabet is among the slickest with his kinder, gentler public health neo-prohibitionism.
Comments
Marijuana Addictive versus Caffeine?
This is anecdotal but, personally, I find coffee much more addictive than marijuana. I can easily go without weed for a week or two with no withdrawal. If i don't get my morning coffee, i have a head ache by afternoon. At I one point I quit for years because my dealer, who was also a friend, was a truther. Scoring weed meant listening to trutherism and it just wasn't worth it, so I quit.
In reply to Marijuana Addictive versus Caffeine? by Old_Cowboy (not verified)
No more dealers!
Yes, one of the unpleasant aspects of marijuana prohibition is the folks we have to deal with to get it. Not all of them, of course, but I have often had to endure face time with guys I really didn't like much or wouldn't choose to be around just because they could get weed to me at a good price. It will be much better when we can buy a bag of buds at the corner market just like we can buy much more problematic alcohol, tobacco or pornography now. And no one seems to mind if kids are in the store when adults are buying those items...no moral panic, no hand-wringing, just a simple, routine transaction.
a good place to plug
http://alternet.org/drugs/5-biggest-lies-anti-pot-propagandist-kevin-sabet
#2, #4, #5
Not having time yet for extensively sampling of the book, I will deal with what I find in Phillip"s summary:
#2: "smoked and eaten"-- but no mention of VAPORIZERS? Someone ask Kevin if he knows anything about the sub-combustion-temperature inhalant harvest technologies now available, including How to Vaporize with a One-Hitter.
#4: Sabet says legalization will increase use and attendant harms. But (a) does he take issue with the idea that legalization will de facto co-legalize ONE-HITTERS, reducing dose from 500-mg (joint) to 25-mg (vape toke)? Now there are "paranoia-infernal-alien" laws where if you possess a screened pipe you are suspected of breaking marijuana laws-- makes it "safer" to use EASIER-TO-HIDE rolling papers, starts a kid off toward addiction to $igarettes. (b) Does Sabet overlook the chance that young-person access to cannabis alternative will PREVENT nicotine addictions, saving the taxpayer $billions down the road in health costs?
#5: Sabet may be right that legalization won't deliver the promised TAX revenues-- but not just because of tax evasion, falling prices and paying for more regulatorcrats, but because MILLIONS of families will raise a couple of sisterplants, just for their own neighborhood, is that "evasion"? When was off-the-grid living, Thoreau, etc., a crime? Maybe what Sabet's puppetstringholders really fear is the loss of $IGARETTE TAX revenue when cannabis legalization kills the H-ot B-urning O-verdose M-onoxide "joint" format and with it the finan$ially $ucce$$ful $igarette format (oops, also now killing 6 million a year worldwide, and costing US economy $193-bil/year health care and productivity loss).
decietful; i hope on the fencers don't fall for his bullshit
Myth #3: Countless People Are Behind Bars Simply for Smoking Marijuana.
No, but if we all agree that they shouldn't be, then why don't we decriminalize possession? Does Sabet want that, or does he want to keep threatening people with jail, and then divert them to drug courts? Plus, there are many people in history who have indeed spent much time in jail over small amounts of weed. It is an insult to those people to not recognize what they went through, with the laws that are on the books right now. The laws right now state that people should literally be locked up for months for the first offense of possessing a little stem. The state hasn't done that to most people for decades now (although a few might be suffering that fate, i wouldn't be surprised), but the laws remain intact in most places. To be fair, i really don't know if Sabet wants to decriminalize, but after hearing him speak on the issue several times, i wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't. He seems to me like he'll do the absolute minimum and most deceptively insignificant changes to the drug war so that people think we're changing something but we're not. The idea of arrest records not haunting you down the line seems like a good idea (and in theory it would be), but it's difficult to know exactly how things will change in that regard, and that maybe ugly things rear their head in different ways and the person still has to deal with other consequences of the arrest. It's just too difficult to go into the unpredictable million little details of what may or may not happen after an arrest, and it seems like the perfect place to plant your deception: to pretend to want to make changes that don't really change anything or, who knows, maybe even worsens things for arrestees. I bet this guy's just in bed with the treatment system or something. The drug treatment systems gets an orgasm with the thought of no jail for anyone, but forcing everyone to go to treatment.
Aside from that, there are indeed countless people behind bars for selling marijuana, and most were not giant kingpins or even close. The people who go to jail for weed are people just like the smokers, but who go a little deeper into the underground world. They buy a few ounces and sell it to friends of friends. They get caught, they're technically dealers (well; they are), but they're just normal nice people who happen to sell weed instead of just smoke it. Let alone the fact that even if you were selling really big quantities you wouldn't deserve to go to jail either. Plus, in many cases there are people who sell it for others. People are hired to stand in a corner with large amounts of little baggies and sell it to people. They are the ones who get caught, not the employers who run things. Also, there are people who are paid to transport it. If you have your own car, they'll tell you, take this pound of weed to the next city for me, and i'll give you a couple of hundred dollars. The guy gets stopped and goes to jail for years, and the guy who runs the show doesn't bat an eye.
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