Drug Crazy - Reefer Madness - Page 178

the front pages in the summer of 1997—“STUDIES BACK GATEWAY ROLE OF POT”—when a group of Italian scientists announced they had discovered both marijuana and heroin stimulate the same pleasure centers in rat brains.^[14] While this was scientifically interesting, the authors leaped from this tiny fact to the more thrilling conclusion that marijuana use may prime the brain for other drugs. But here again, these same principals could be used to demonstrate that sex and cheese could also turn rats into junkies.^[15]  Another group came up with evidence that marijuana withdrawal causes the same chemical changes in rats as hard drugs. “This blurs the distinction between a hard drug and a soft drug.”^[16] But long-term students of the battle point out that all attempts to prove the addiction thesis using real human beings have failed completely.^[17]

Currently, one of the leading scientific lights of the marijuana prohibition movement is Dr. Gabriel Nahas, a hero of the French resistance in World War II and a sworn enemy of the cannabis plant. As consultant to the UN Commission on Narcotics, Dr. Nahas has been an advisor to the White House and to most of America’s major anti-drug organizations. Over the last quarter-century he has endeavored to supply a scientific rationale for the drug war, and while his efforts have been lauded by the prohibitionists, his colleagues in the medical profession seem less impressed. As one observer put it, “No drug-abuse scholar in recent history has been the subject of such scathing commentaries in the scientific journals.”^[18]  A review of his work in The New England Journal of Medicine called it “psychopharmacologic McCarthyism” peppered with “half-truths, innuendo and unverifiable assertions.” The Journal of the AMA noted that “examples of biased selection and...omissions of facts abound in every chapter.” Contemporary Drug Problems was even less charitable: “meretricious trash.”^[19] When Nahas recently published a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia^[20] claiming that new research proved marijuana was toxic, he was immediately attacked by pharmacologists from the University of Sydney who discovered that he was largely quoting