Pot and Alcohol: Some New Views

President Nixon believes that the law should punish pot smokers. Thus it has been widely assumed that because nine of its 13 members* are Nixon appointees, the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse would rubber-stamp Administration views when it made, its recommendations to Congress. Last week, when the gist of the group's still unpublished report leaked out a month early, the skeptics were amazed. After a year of study, the commission has decided that criminal penalties for possession and for private use of marijuana should be entirely abolished.

Some of the key reasons for the recommendation:

> Even partial legislation of marijuana (sale and public smoking would remain criminal acts) might cut the use of heroin by taking "the young marijuana user out of a criminal drug-using subculture."

> Marijuana is not addictive, and the idea that pot smoking escalates to heroin use is "totally invalid."

> Marijuana has little or no relation to crime and violence; in fact, it may even help deter them by reducing aggressiveness.

> It is not rebellion or alienation that leads to pot use as much as the life-style of certain groups--and lifestyle and patterns of social behavior cannot readily be changed by legal fiat.

>Just as millions of Americans, undeterred by the Volstead Act, drank liquor illegally before Prohibition was repealed, so millions are now smoking marijuana. Scientists estimate that some 24 million have tried the drug. Three million are believed to use it from one to four times a month, another 5,000,000 smoke it at least once a week, and 500,000 daily or even more often. Within five years, believes Psychologist William McGlothlin of the University of California at Los Angeles, there may be 6,000,000 to 12 million weekly users and from 800,000 to 2.5 million daily ones.

Another drug, more widely used and abused, was the subject of a Government report last week. Alcohol, said the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, is the cause of the nation's major treatable--but largely untreated--illness.

Of the country's 95 million drinkers, nearly 9,000,000 are victims of alcoholism. Besides causing intense emotional suffering, the institute reported, alcoholism shortens the life of people by ten to a dozen years, sometimes through slow damage done to internal organs, sometimes through swift violence: autopsies show a high alcohol content in the blood of half of all traffic-accident victims and a third of all murder victims--many of whom were presumably killed by other drinkers. In addition, alcoholism costs the U.S. $15 billion a year in property damage, lost work time and for health and welfare aid to alcoholics and their families.

Laughing Matter. Though the report states that alcoholism can be successfully treated by a variety of methods, mostly psychological, the nation persists in trying to handle the problem through law and punishment. In most states, public drunkenness can result in a fine or a jail term or both; a third of all arrests are for being drunk in public.

Part of the problem, says Institute Director Morris Chafetz, is that "America has been laughing at drunks. Yet studies show that countries where drunken behavior is socially acceptable have a lot of alcohol problems, while those that frown on drunks (for example, Israel, Italy and China) have the opposite experience." For this reason, the institute has just mounted an advertising campaign to promote moderate as opposed to excessive drinking. Warns one typical ad: "If you need a drink to be social, that's not social drinking."

*Most of them Congressmen, psychiatrists or lawyers.

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