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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Australia: Marijuana, The Not So Happy Herb
Mary-Anne Toy Age, The (Australia)
Saturday 20 Jan 2001 Although he's the Prime Minister's chief drugs adviser, Major Brian Watters of the Salvation Army usually finds himself out of step with health and drug specialists. Most people who work in drug treatment oppose Watters' conservative stance on heroin trials and supervised injecting rooms. So it was a little surprising that when Watters maintained this week that the community's familiarity with cannabis was breeding complacency and even a generation of apathetic teenagers who drop out of school and jobs, get involved with "harder" drugs and run the risk of suffering psychiatric disorders the specialists agreed with him, albeit cautiously. Yes, they said, the increasing social acceptability of dope smoking, coupled with the success of the anti-tobacco lobby and even the overwhelming focus on "hard" drugs such as heroin, has had the unintended effect of suggesting, particularly to the young, that cannabis is safe. This week Watters, who was handpicked by Prime Minister John Howard to chair the Australian National Council on Drugs, announced that the council would put a greater emphasis on cannabis. The council is also expected to outline a new cannabis strategy in March. This will include its response to a New South Wales study that recommends that patients should be able legally to relieve their pain with marijuana if they have permission from their doctor. The council's shift was prompted by feedback from rural and regional forums held by council members last year. Country people overwhelmingly reported that alcohol was the number one drug issue for them but that cannabis use by young people was the next biggest area of concern. Drug experts are unanimous: cannabis is not safe. While it rarely kills only one death from cannabis smoking was recorded in Victoria in 1998 and it is unclear how this occurred it is implicated as a risk factor for psychosis in susceptible young people. As marijuana has become more socially accepted, researchers report that the age at which young people begin smoking dope is dropping dramatically. Dr Jan Copeland, a senior lecturer at the National Drug and Alcohol Centre at the University of New South Wales, says cannabis has more toxins and tar than tobacco but that most people don't smoke 40 joints a day. However, Copeland says drug workers on the north coast of New South Wales are reporting concerns that young people are becoming addicted to nicotine through cannabis use, as marijuana is commonly mixed with tobacco in joints. "They ( young people ) seem to see it as the 'happy herb'; that it does no harm. They don't understand that not only is it bad but it can introduce then to a tobacco habit as well," Copeland says. Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit drug in Australia, especially among teenagers. The 1996 Australian School Students' Alcohol and Drugs Survey found 36.4per cent of 12 to 17-year-olds had reported using it at least once in the past week and 4per cent of males reported using cannabis on at least six occasions in the past week. Most casual users show no signs of serious damage. Yet Dr Tim Rolfe the deputy director of the Dandenong Area Mental Health Services says the research shows an increased risk of schizophrenia for regular users of cannabis ( those who use more than 50 times a year ). Still, cannabis is almost certainly one of many risk factors, he says. Surveys show that 50 to 60per cent of people with mental illnesses use cannabis but there is no clear evidence that it marijuana contributes to mental illness. A new study in progress by Rolfe and Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, director of the Dandenong health service and a consultant psychiatrist, is trying to work out the role cannabis plays in schizophrenia. The study follows anecdotal evidence from both doctors who have treated hundreds of patients with schizophrenia whose symptoms have abated or decreased when they stopped using cannabis and recurred or increased when they began again. 'People are worried," says Rolfe. "Carers of people with mental illness see it ( cannabis use ) in people with illness such as schizophrenia and observe it and almost uniformly report that its consequences are bad." "That doesn't mean cannabis causes mental illness. We know that it contributes to the risk of developing a psychiatric disorder but there are many other risk factors and the majority of users don't develop a mental illness." All of which might help explain Watters' stance. In a letter to The Age this week, he wrote that the regional forums showed that cannabis problems were far more prevalent than previously thought and that "even more disturbingly, that young people are starting to believe that cannabis is a completely harmless drug". Another council member is Professor Margaret Hamilton, director of Victoria's Turning Point Alcohol and Drug centre. Hamilton thinks the debate on whether cannabis should be decriminalised or legalised has overshadowed the issue of the health risks of smoking marijuana. Hamilton sees good reasons for cannabis decriminalisation, notably that it might stop young people from getting caught up in illicit activities. However, "we have underplayed cannabis as a health risk in the flurry of debate about its legal status. "There's been very little debate about the risk associated with its use. There are people who are more and less vulnerable, so it's a much more sophisticated story then whether it is legal or not. Certainly there is strong anecdotal evidence about heavy cannabis use and first psychosis in young people. There's no strong evidence of a direct causal relationship but enough anecdotal evidence to be concerned. "There is a general view that it is harmless. It's not but it's far less harmful then many things, even perhaps alcohol." Hamilton says it is also unhelpful to talk about tackling single drugs, as most people who use one illegal drug also use legal ones, often at greater detriment to their health. "If heroin has bumped anything off our agenda it's alcohol," she says. Another council member, Professor Wayne Hall of the national drug and alcohol research centre at the University of New South Wales, says cannabis isn't killing people as heroin does, but because it is so widely used there are bound to be problems. However, he cautions against "alarmist" statements such as "war on cannabis". Heroin remains the drug that most worries the public, says Hall. "It may come down to the differences between rural and urban. In Sydney and Melbourne it's clearly heroin ... cannabis just doesn't rate as an issue from that point of view but the anxiety of parents in the country is cannabis, which is much more available." Five years ago the Kennett government's Drugs Advisory Council recommended that marijuana be decriminalised so an effective health campaign could be mounted. The council argued that while it remained illegal, young people, in particular, would remain immune to the dangers of its use. Professor David Penington, head of Kennett's council and now of the Bracks Government's Drug Policy Expert Committee, says there is no doubt cannabis use is a problem. Nevertheless, "to suggest it is comparable to heroin is absolute nonsense. Many more lives are lost from alcohol and tobacco than marijuana. Any education about substance abuse should include alcohol and tobacco as well as marijuana".
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