General
Drug Risks: A Japanese View
From taima.org
A group of private individuals
researching and publishing information
about all aspects of Hemp culture in Japan.
In the public imagination drugs are unique substances that have been made illegal because if people use them, they soon become addicted and risk their health, sanity and life. We think of all drug users as addicts who can't control themselves.
We don't imagine that they could be like us. When we think of drugs we think of injected heroin and amphetamines. We think of withdrawal symptoms when the drug is withdrawn and an increased need for the drug the longer someone consumes. We are told that drugs are mind altering. We automatically don't think of something as a drug if it is legal, as alcohol, cigarettes or caffeine are.
The Japanese term for drugs is mayaku which literally means hemp drugs and so many people naively believe that what is true for any of these drugs is true for all. This is not the case. All these substances come from different plants or chemicals. Hemp is a totally different plant from poppies.
There is little that these drugs have in common with each other that they don't share with legal substances such as tobacco and alcohol. The English term drug is wider and catches alcohol and caffeine along with heroin and cannabis.
The risks for harm vary enormously from substance to substance (including legal ones such as alcohol, nicotine and caffeine).
When you look into how scientists rank drug risks you'll see their rankings are quite different from those provided by our lawmakers. Contrary to what you'd expect, there is really no direct corelation between the legal status of a drug and its dangers (other than the danger of being arrested).
Some of the most harmful drugs are legal while some of the least dangerous ones are strictly prohibited. The reasons drugs get banned are historical, social and racial but rarely medical.
As more people discover these irrational aspects of our laws and the hypocritical double standards they represent, they lose their respect for the law and stop cooperating with law enforcement, ultimately making drug prohibition as unenforceable as alcohol prohibition was in the America of the 1920s and 1930s.
Cannabis is only relatively mildly intoxicating when compared to alcohol. Unlike opiates, alcohol and nicotine marijuana is not known to cause physical addiction, has no withdrawal symptoms, causes few problems with tolerance and is extremely safe with regards to overdoses.
Though people have died from taking too much caffeine or even drinking too much water, not even one person is known to have died of a marijuana overdose.
But don't take our word for these claims, read for yourself!
Addiction
Here is how two U.S. drug experts rated various drugs according to the individual factors that the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) considers when determining addictive qualities [1].
Both researchers were asked to rate six of the most common recreational drugs according to risk factors, from 1 being the most risky and 6 being the least risky of the six. This is how they ranked marijuana against caffeine and four other drugs:
Ratings by Dr. Jack Henningfield
National Institute on Drug Abuse
| Substance | Withdrawal | Reinforcement | Tolerance | Dependence | Intoxication |
| Nicotine | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 5 |
| Heroin | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Cocaine | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 3 |
| Alcohol | 1 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| Caffeine | 5 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 6 |
| Marijuana | 6 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 4 |
1 = Most Serious Least Serious = 6 According to these ratings, marijuana is about as addictive a drug as coffee while alcohol, nicotine, cocaine and heroin are more risky, some considerably so. Alcohol is rated the most dangerous on withdrawal, as sudden abstinence can have life-threatening effects for an alcoholic.
Alcohol is rated the most intoxicating of all the drugs listed while nicotine dependence is rated even ahead of heroin.
Dr. Henningfield works for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the U.S. government institution that conducts or finances about 80% of all drug abuse research worldwide.
By Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, U of California, San Francisco: | Substance | Withdrawal | Reinforcement | Tolerance | Dependence | Intoxication |
| Nicotine | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 6 |
| Heroin | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Cocaine | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| Alcohol | 1 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 |
| Caffeine | 5 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 5 |
| Marijuana | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 4 |
1 = Most Serious Least Serious = 6
The exact ratings by Dr. Benowitz were a little different, but the ranking is basically the same: Marijuana is one of the least addictive recreational substances, more comparable to coffee than to heroin or alcohol.
Overdose Deaths
Another consideration is the acute risk to life and health from use of the drug, especially if it is used in a higher than normal dose. Even a non-addictive drug can be harmful if it is relatively poisonous. A measure for the risk of a dangerous level of intoxication is LD50.
That's the amount of the drug that administered to animals or humans would kill half the subjects. The greater the ratio between the normal dose and LD50 the lower the risk of a fatal overdose. Here are these ratios for three of the most popular recreational drugs:
| Substance | Safety Margin |
|
|
| Alcohol | 1:4 - 1:20 |
| Caffeine | 1:100 |
| Marijuana | 1:40,000 |
- The nicotine contained in a single cigarette, when eaten, can kill a baby.
- Two or three cigarettes, when eaten, can kill a healthy adult.
- Drinking a large bottle of whisky in one night can kill an adult.
- Swallowing about fifty aspirin can be fatal.
- A tube of sleeping pills and you lose your liver... or your life!
- The caffeine in about 100 cups of coffee, taken in pill form, is lethal.
- All these substances are legal.
By comparison, according to tests on rats and monkeys,[2] an adult would have to eat between 1 and 2 kg (2 to 4.5 pounds) of marijuana, enough for rolling several thousand joints, all in a single day to run a risk of a fatal overdose. It is simply impossible to kill oneself by smoking or eating too much marijuana.
In 5,000 years of recorded marijuana history not a single person is known to ever have died from a marijuana overdose. After hearing extensive evidence Judge Young of the US Drug Enforcement Agency concluded in 1988 in his ruling on the legal status of marijuana as a medicine: Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.
Other Potential Health Problems
There is only one aspect of marijuana that makes it stand out from other legally accepted medications, and that is that it is commonly smoked. We know that smoking tobacco is bad and so it stands to reason that smoking marijuana would be just as bad, or maybe even worse than tobacco. This in itself is no argument for marijuana prohibition. We should remember that smoking is by no means the only way of using cannabis.
The moderate risks associated with smoked marijuana can be avoided altogether by using it orally, as tea or cooked into food, which is how it has been used for centuries in India and other countries. In the late 19th century drug cannabis in the West was applied mostly as a tincture, in food or as a drink, while smoking was relatively uncommon.
Unlike tobacco which can lead to cancer even when chewed or used as snuff, herbal cannabis itself is non-toxic and does not contain any known cancer-causing substances. THC, the main active ingredient of marijuana, may even help to prevent cancer: A study in which rats were injected with high doses of THC found that fewer of those rats developed cancer than those that did not receive THC [3].
Using cannabis orally has become uncommon because of high prices when it was made illegal, as oral use requires higher doses and smoking uses the expensive drug more efficiently. If marijuana was available legally at lower prices then far fewer people would smoke it and more would eat or drink it, eliminating all respiratory risks at once.
If science were to prove serious risks from smoking cannabis similar to those demonstrated for tobacco then the most effective response from a public health point of view would not be to arrest users, which has proven ineffective, but to educate users about whatever risks there are and to suggest safer alternatives to smoking.
There has been limited research into vaporizers or inhalers (as used for asthma treatment), devices which allow for rapid onset of THC-response for patients without generating irritating smoke. Development of such alternatives was suggested by the American Institute of Medicine to the US government in a study ordered by drug czar McCaffrey.
Currently, so-called drug paraphernalia laws that have been passed in many US-states make it illegal to sell or possess any device meant for consuming illegal drugs, even though some of these devices would reduce most of the risks associated with smoked cannabis.
How Harmful Is Smoked Marijuana?
The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health.
The Lancet
British medical journal
November 11, 1995
This may sound like a bold statement, but it comes from the premier medical publication in the UK, and there are good reasons why the authors chose to make that statement. Though marijuana smoke consists largely of the same substances as tobacco smoke does (such as carbon monoxide and tars) there are still some major differences:
Three out of four tobacco deaths are not cancer-related. Instead, they happen because of cardiovascular diseases caused by nicotine which leads to a hardening of arteries. Cannabis does not contain nicotine.
Amongst the cancer causing substances in tobacco smoke, nitrosamines are suspected to be major culprit.[4] Nitrosamines are produced from nicotine when tobacco leaves are fermented.
The main difference however is that cannabis smokers smoke a lot less cannabis than tobacco smokers smoke tobacco. While most tobacco users are daily smokers most marijuana users are not. The Japanese ministry of Health and Welfare estimates 53.9% of Japanese smokers are tobacco-dependent.[5]
A study by the German Ministry of Health estimated that by the same criteria, only 2% of cannabis users are psychologically cannabis-dependent.[6] Cannabis is not physically addictive.
Only about a quarter of all Americans who have ever tried marijuana used it in the previous twelve months. Only half of those used it during the previous month. Many users only use it at parties, on weekends, or a single joint in the evening, to relax after a day's work.
Unlike nicotine THC is not addictive and no serious withdrawal symptoms are produced when use of the drug is stopped even after extended periods of regular use.
Another difference is that like with crack cocaine the effects of nicotine on the central nervous system wear off after only about 15 minutes while THC remains active for between one and four hours. If the effects of the particular drug are experienced pleasant then one would have to smoke a lot more cigarettes than joints to experience those effects for any length of time.
This is why two out of three male cigarette smokers in Japan smoke 20 and more cigarettes per day, while even heavy marijuana smokers smoke no more than maybe 5 times a day. Furthermore, a tobacco cigarette is twice the weight of a typical marijuana joint and the difference is even greater when compared to higher grade marijuana.
Long-term studies by Dr. Donald Tashkin of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) showed that lung function degrades with age by about as much for marijuana-only smokers as for non-smokers. Lung function degraded much more dramatically amongst tobacco-only smokers. Smokers who used both tobacco and marijuana actually did a little better than tobacco-only smokers, as the latter probably smoked more cigarettes in total.
The bottom line is that whatever risks there are from cannabis smoke, in practice they are likely to be significantly lower than for tobacco smoke. So far scientists have been unable to establish conclusive evidence of a relationship between marijuana smoking and lung cancer or other serious diseases that often affect tobacco smokers, despite millions of dollars of government money spent specifically trying to establish such links.
The largest study conducted so far involved 65,171 patients of the American medical insurance company Kaiser Permanente and was completed in June 1996. It found that marijuana-smoking women and men had a lower death rate than either cigarette smokers or people who drank three beers or more per day.
As long as cigarettes and beer remain legal while marijuana is not, the legal status of these drugs is inconsistent with their risks and people are given the false impression that alcohol and cigarettes are less harmful than cannabis when in truth they are much more harmful.
Footnotes:
[1] See http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/basicfax.htm.
[2] See http://ntp-db.niehs.nih.gov/.
[3] See http://ntp-server.niehs.nih.gov/htdocs/LT-studies/tr446.html for the study that showed fewer cancers in THC-treated animals.
[4] New Scientist (UK), 8 May, 1999, p18-19: The Lesser of two Evils.
[5] Japan Times, 1999.11.12: 33.63 Million Japanese smoke.
[6] Dieter Kleiber: Cannabiskomsum in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
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