Dazed and confused

There’s little evidence on benefits of pot

CALL IT high times for the marijuana industry, and an industry it is. No longer do you have to track down the college kid growing seeds under a grow light in his off-campus apartment. Dope comes in professional, prepackaged dime bags these days. Now that marijuana is legal across much of the land—and “medical marijuana” legal in large swaths of the rest of it—weed has taken on some respectability. Somebody said there are more pot stores in Colorado than Starbucks. We checked it. Somebody was right.

Along with respectability, even if an unearned respectability, comes assumptions by We the People. Who can blame us? For years advocates of marijuana have been telling us of its benefits. But without a lot of scientific backing. Mostly it’s anecdotal evidence, but if that’s all you can pound, you pound anecdotal evidence.

An academic journal called Annals of Internal Medicine (annals.org) has come out with a new survey. It asked Americans what they thought of marijuana, its benefits, its risks, its prevalence. The survey found that 81 percent of U.S. adults thought weed had at least one benefit. (The most common: pain management, which is understandable.) But there are a lot of people who also think marijuana can treat diseases like epilepsy and MS and depression and PTSD. The survey also mentioned this, which should strike any informed reader, like a hammer to the thumb: “Among U.S. adults, 29.2 percent agree that smoking marijuana prevents health problems.” Prevents health problems? Worse:

“About 18 percent believe exposure to secondhand marijuana smoke is somewhat or completely safe for adults, whereas 7.6 percent indicated that it is somewhat or completely safe for children. Of the respondents, 7.3 percent agree that marijuana use is somewhat or completely safe during pregnancy.”

Oh, Lord. What are these people smoking?

Those who put together this survey included various doctors and other experts in the field. Their conclusion, verbatim as per the survey’s main page:

Americans’ view of marijuana use is more favorable than existing evidence supports.

“They believe things that we have no data for,” said Dr. Salomeh Keyhani, a professor at the University of California in San Fran, and the study’s lead author.

“We need better data. We need any data.”

There’s just not a lot of scientific evidence on the benefits of weed, given the laws of the land. A lot of people on the pro-marijuana side will blame the law for that. But, even if the law is an ass, would Americans be smart to legalize any other drug just to get better evidence of how it might harm folks? Only with marijuana is this taken as a logical argument.

In stories about the new survey, the papers say that 31 states have legalized medical dope, and some allow doctors to prescribe it for post traumatic stress disorder—for which there’s little evidence to support medical benefits. This from The Guardian newspaper:

“Mixed signals regarding marijuana’s potential dangers and benefits have enabled the commercial marijuana industry to promote a maximalist view of marijuana’s possible benefits. Since direct unproven claims of marijuana’s medical benefits, and assertions such as that a product cures cancer, can lead to unwanted attention from the FDA regulators, cannabis companies have learned to be much more subtle.

“Starting with the largely uncontested assertion that no one has ever died from a marijuana overdose, companies will often go on to promote softer, if still unproven, notions of cannabis’ curative properties. For example, the website of the California company Papa & Barkley features testimonials from customers who say the company’s products relieved their arthritis pain, anxiety, insomnia and a guitarist’s finger cramps.”

Business Insider recently wrote an article based on a massive report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine about the effects of weed. The whole report was peppered with words and phrases like “in the short term,” “could be tied,” “don’t seem to increase” and “could increase the risk of.” The report had more clinton clauses than a Clinton speech.

Folks, we just don’t know. None of us do. According to doctors who study this carefully.

And for this, some will promote a powerful and addictive drug, even though there is little evidence of its benefit.

But what a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power, to reason away.

Yes, we know, that’s the Doobie Brothers. Ya just can’t get away from the stuff.