An Analysis of marijuana policy

The Committee on Substance Abuse and Habitual Behavior reviews and analyzes many marijuana policies and concerns. This report does not review and analyze every conceivable policy nuance or option. It addresses the major choices--both because these families of alternative policies subsume many variants and because the choice among these major options must be discussed before specific, perhaps new, policy instruments can be designed. Many of those participating in the marijuana debate have already selected what they take to be the admissible terms of the discussion and look with disfavor on anyone's insistence on a wider set of considerations. For example, some would settle the issue on physiological grounds alone: whether cannabis products, in the dose ranges customarily used by most people, cause tissue damage.^ Defenders of marijuana use may seize on the ambiguity or absence of evidence for such damage and ignore any other effects on education or safety; those opposed to marijuana use may emphasize the possibility of chronic disease that is suggested by some laboratory findings and ignore the social, political, and economic costs of fighting a well-established custom. The Committee wishes to make clear what it regards as the limits of this report for the selection of policy alteratives. Scientific judgment can estimate the prevalence of different kinds of use, risks to health, economic costs, and the like under current policies and can try to project such estimates for new policies. It can come to some conclusions based on those estimates. But selection of an alternative is always a value-governed choice, which can ultimately be made only by the political process.^ The role of scientific evidence in this process is not inconsiderable, even though, at times, the strongest evidence may be pushed aside and the wildest speculation prevail. But the weight of the evidence is only one factor in the process of policy formation; ultimately, that process involves value choices. In completing its report, the Committee has benefited from many people in formulating, revising, and updating the analyses and data. A very early version of this report was discussed at the Committee's annual conference in 1979, and subsequent versions benefited from comments by staff of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and of the National Research Council. The final draft received close and constructive attention by members of the National Research Council's Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, the Institute of Medicine, and the Report Review Committee of the National Academy of Sciences.