Columbia to vote on legalizing marijuana

The Columbia City Council last week decided to put a controversial issue before voters on April ballot: Should the city legalize marijuana for medical use and reduce the penalties for others found with small amounts of the substance?

The penalty reduction is significant -- from up to a $1,000 fine and one year in jail to no jail time and $25 for the first offense. The maximum penalty would be $500 under the proposed change.

While this may appear to be a proposal born out of concern for people with certain illnesses who, advocates claim, obtain much-needed relief from their suffering unavailable from any other source, in reality it is an attempt to pretty much legalize the use of marijuana by anyone for any reason.

For those who consider partaking of marijuana among young people to be a harmless rite of passage, the ballot issue probably seems like a good idea. These proponents say trying to prosecute such cases is a waste of time and taxpayer dollars anyway.

Perhaps those folks haven't read the recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the most highly regarded publication on health.

Researchers found that teenagers who smoke marijuana are two to five times more likely to use other illicit drugs than their peers who don't smoke marijuana.

It's called the "gateway hypothesis," one touted by law enforcement and concerned parents for decades but never so strongly backed up with hard facts.

Michael T. Lynskey with the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, lead author of the report, studied 311 sets of same-sex adult twins in Australia. Such subjects were chosen because they shared genetic characteristics and were raised the same way. In each case, one twin smoked marijuana before age 17, and the other twin didn't.

Nearly half of the young marijuana smokers went on to use cocaine or other stimulant drugs. The study speculates that, because marijuana use is pleasurable and relatively safe from prosecution, users are more likely to take drug abuse to the next level.

Researchers also suggest that marijuana causes biochemical changes that encourage users to take more drugs, but there is no hard evidence of that at this time.

At a minimum, smoking marijuana damages the lungs and opens users of any age to bad decision-making.

Voters in Columbia would do well to read the full study before voting. A yes vote on the issue would be perceived only one way by that city's youth: as an open invitation to smoke 'em if they've got 'em.