[420 Girl]

Congressman Mark Kirk, a Republican from Highland Park, recently introduced legislation to massively increase penalties for producers and sellers of higher-potency marijuana. It's hard to know what's worse, the congressman's scientific ignorance or his blatant hypocrisy.

Kirk said he thought the penalty for selling high-THC marijuana should be equivalent to that for cocaine. From a scientific perspective, that's laughable. Unlike cocaine, THC is essentially non- toxic. It is literally impossible to fatally overdose on even the highest-strength marijuana. And scientific experts remain unconvinced that higher-THC marijuana is any more dangerous.

A review published last year by the journal Addiction noted that warnings about escalating marijuana potency date back to at least 1975, and that the evidence for claims of major increases in potency is "fragmented and fraught with methodological errors."

The researchers concluded that "more research is needed" to determine whether increased potency increases risk at all. International experts report that when marijuana is more potent, users simply smoke less, just as they drink a smaller amount of bourbon than they would beer. Yet Kirk wants us to believe that marijuana is somehow magically different.

The scientific fact - as verified by another prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet - is that marijuana of any strength is far safer than either tobacco or alcohol: It's less addictive, far less toxic, and massively less likely than booze to provoke violence or aggression.

Over the years, Congressman Kirk has raked in thousands of dollars of campaign cash from the tobacco and alcohol industries, including the company that owns Philip Morris tobacco and the National Beer Wholesalers Association.

Meanwhile, he engages in empty political posturing about a nonexistent threat from high-strength marijuana. It's a cheap and dangerous political ploy that should be soundly rejected.

Bruce Mirken
Marijuana Policy Project
Washington, D.C.

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