[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 2822]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         WHAT IS MORE DANGEROUS, MARIJUANA OR METHAMPHETAMINES?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, last week, during a hearing with the 
Deputy Director of the Office of Drug Policy, there was a moment of 
clarity for me. I was struck by the realization that our own office, 
charged with drug policy, discouraging or eliminating drug use, might 
well be part of the problem.
  The poor witness was unable to answer my simple question, What is 
more dangerous, marijuana or methamphetamines? I asked, How many 
marijuana overdose deaths were there last year? No clear answer.
  The United States does have a drug problem--make no mistake--and it 
appears to be getting worse: 100 people per day die of drug overdoses. 
About 9 of them are from heroin; 60 percent of the deaths are from 
prescription drugs; pharmaceuticals, over 22,000 in 2010, the most 
recent year we have available, almost three times higher than in 1999.
  Why is the $25 billion we spend fighting drugs each year so 
ineffective in stopping, much less reversing, the trend? Are our 
policies and programs misguided? Could it be that too many of the wrong 
people are spending far too long in jail, wasting lives and money? The 
States seem to think so. They are reducing sentences and releasing 
prisoners. Now even the Federal Government is starting to do that as 
well.
  I think part of the problem is that we aren't honest about the 
impacts and dangers. Nothing better illustrates that than the continued 
misclassification of marijuana under Federal law as worse than cocaine 
and methamphetamines. That's according to Federal law.
  Is it possible that this Federal dishonesty means that people don't 
take drug warnings seriously? No one knows anybody who ever died from a 
marijuana overdose. The failed marijuana prohibition could actually 
make the real drug problem worse.
  Since all marijuana sales are, by definition, illegal, in the 
shadows, the money, the income, the profits help finance a drug trade 
that destroys life, like heroin, cocaine, illegal prescription drugs, 
and methamphetamines.
  How easy is it for the distributor, who has no license to lose, who 
never checks ID, to offer his marijuana customer something else, 
something worse, something more dangerous?
  I fear spreading misinformation and wasting resources, arresting two-
thirds of a million people for something that most Americans now think 
should be legal, undermines what could be an effective approach. Think 
for a moment. Unlike marijuana, tobacco is a highly addictive killer--
over four hundred thousand people a year die from it yet tobacco use 
has declined almost two-thirds in the last half century. How did that 
happen?
  We don't arrest people who smoke. We didn't try tobacco prohibition. 
What we did was research. We found out the facts. We told the truth. We 
controlled the product. We taxed it heavily, raising the cost, 
especially to young people--all the steps exactly the opposite of our 
failed marijuana approach.
  I will be clear. For me, this goes beyond issues of marijuana policy. 
It is a symbol of a political process that is not thoughtful, not 
rational on dealing with things from the national debt, to our failing 
infrastructure, to climate change. Isn't it time for us to face some 
facts, adjust some policies, and move ahead?

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