The attorney general of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Kane (D), recently said she's against marijuana legalization - not for any solid personal or objective reason, but for the same laughably lame, demonstrably debunked reason that our conservative Republican governor, Tom Corbett, holds the same position - the belief that marijuana is a "gateway drug" that leads people to use harder, more harmful drugs. If I wanted a state attorney general that spouted that kind of ludicrous lie, I could have voted for the Republican candidate.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane, the first woman and the first Democrat elected to the position
I voted for Kathleen Kane last year, and I was very excited for her to become the first Democrat as well as the first woman to be elected state attorney general since it became an elected office
in 1980. Her
first official act as PA attorney general was to close a loophole that allowed Pennsylvania residents who couldn't pass the background check for a concealed carry permit for their gun(s) (or had their permit revoked) to get one from Florida - even if they never lived in Florida - and have that legally count in PA. This loophole had been a point of contention between Democrats and Republicans in previous state-wide campaigns, with Democrats calling for it to be closed and Republicans - including
Governor Tom Corbett in the 2010 gubernatorial election - saying it wasn't a problem and didn't need to be closed. (Because if PA thinks someone shouldn't have a concealed carry permit, what's wrong with that person having a concealed carry permit in PA? Right?) Kathleen Kane came through for us on that. The Democrats had their position, the Republicans had their position, the Democrats won, and PA got the law the Democrats favored. But at a recent press event, Kathleen Kane was asked about her position on marijuana legalization, and it turns out she not only has the same position on it as our conservative Republican governor, but she also holds that position for the exact same piss-poor excuse for a reason that Corbett himself does. It's bipartisan
Reefer Madness at its worst.
According to the Associated Press:
HARRISBURG — State Attorney General Kathleen Kane told a gathering of newspaper editors Friday that she opposes legislation to legalize marijuana because users often move on to harder drugs.
"It's a gateway drug," Kane said in a luncheon speech during the annual conference of the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors.
"When you don't get your high from marijuana you're going to turn to something else. It's going to be oxycodone and then it's going to be heroin. It doesn't stop just at marijuana," she said. "I oppose it for criminal justice reasons."
Kane, a Democrat who previously spent more than a decade as a Lackawanna County prosecutor, did not totally close the door medical marijuana bills but said more information is needed about what qualifies as a medical use and how prescriptions would be regulated.
"Who can get it? What are going to be the safeguards to make sure that these scripts or letters from your doctor aren't given out willy-nilly? And also ... it creates a market for selling these things and we want to make sure that that doesn't happen," she said.
At least one bill to legalize the personal use of marijuana and two bills to decriminalize medical marijuana are pending in legislative committees.
Kane made her comments about marijuana in response to questions from the audience following a speech in which she described her hectic four-month tenure as Pennsylvania's chief legal officer, her efforts to make the office more accessible to citizens and the difficulty of deciding whether to release or withhold information about high-profile cases. ...
Kane is pushing two notions here that rub me as mind-numbingly absurd. First the easy part.
Marijuana is not a gateway drug. There's a whole other argument to be had over whether addiction to harder drugs that marijuana is allegedly a "gateway" to according to Kathleen Kane and Tom Corbett should be treated as a medical issue rather than a criminal issue, but let's just keep it simple and stay on track. Here's a great aggregate of
science and sources on the issue courtesy of Scott Morgan:
In 1999, drug czar Barry McCaffrey commissioned a major study on medical marijuana conducted by the venerable Institute of Medicine, which included an examination of marijuana's potential to lead to other drug use. In simple terms, the researchers explained why the gateway theory was unfounded:
Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are strikingly regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana -- usually before they are of legal age.
…
There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.
In 2006, the University of Pittsburgh released a more thorough study in which researchers spent 12 years tracking a group of subjects from adolescence into adulthood and documented the initiation and progression of their drug use. The researchers found that the gateway theory was not only wrong, but also harmful to properly understanding and addressing drug abuse:
This evidence supports what’s known as the common liability model, an emerging theory that states the likelihood that someone will transition to the use of illegal drugs is determined not by the preceding use of a particular drug but instead by the user’s individual tendencies and environmental circumstances.
“The emphasis on the drugs themselves, rather than other, more important factors that shape a person’s behavior, has been detrimental to drug policy and prevention programs,” Dr. Tarter said. “To become more effective in our efforts to fight drug abuse, we should devote more attention to interventions that address these issues, particularly to parenting skills that shape the child’s behavior as well as peer and neighborhood environments.”
Of course, the simplest refutation of the gateway theory is the basic fact that most marijuana users just don't use other drugs. As the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports:
More than 100 million Americans have tried marijuana; 14.4 million Americans are estimated to be "past-month" users. Yet there are only an estimated 2,075,000 "past-month" users of cocaine and 153,000 "past-month" users of heroin. [DrugWarFacts]
And the other part of her quote that strikes me as mind-numbingly absurd is when she says of medical marijuana, "... it creates a market for selling these things and we want to make sure that that doesn't happen ... ." It
creates a market for marijuana? That means she thinks... there is currently no marijuana market in Pennsylvania? This should go without saying, but since the freaking Democratic state attorney general is selling this absurdity, allow me to point out that there already is a market for marijuana in Pennsylvania. Whether or not we have medical marijuana will
not determine if there's a market in PA for marijuana or not. In fact, in
a piece promoting his bill to fully legalize marijuana in PA, state Senator Daylin Leach said "According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in 2006, an average year, 24,685 marijuana arrests were made in Pennsylvania at a cost of $325.36 million. Each year we not only spend a similar amount, we leave several hundred million dollars on the table in taxes that we do not collect because marijuana is illegal rather than regulated and taxed. Aside from the moral issues involved, we simply can no longer afford the financial costs of prohibition." But we don't have a marijuana market in Pennsylvania, because
gateway drug, be afraid!
State Senator Daylin Leach
So Kathleen Kane is full of crap. I would say her assertion that marijuana is a gateway drug couldn't be further from the truth, but her specific assertion that "When you don't get your high from marijuana you're going to turn to something else. It's going to be oxycodone and then it's going to be heroin. It doesn't stop just at marijuana," is such a blatant falsehood as to practically mock the listener/reader, and saying medical marijuana would "create" a market for marijuana in PA makes me question just how far from the truth she can get. According to scientific research, it actually does "stop just at marijuana" for over 10 million Americans and up to 100 million Americans depending on how you look at it. Pennsylvania already spends hundreds of million of dollars arresting people for participating in the marijuana market every single year. She's just wrong, and whether she's really as ignorant about the issue as she's making it seem or simply taking what she deems to be the most politically advantageous position for herself, she's weakening the contrast that exists between Democrats and Republicans on the issue.
Governor Tom Corbett
Last year, when asked about Republican Governor Corbett's position on marijuana legalization,
a spokesperson for his office said simply "He believes that smoking marijuana is a crime, should remain a crime and that marijuana is a gateway drug." You've just read the science that proves him wrong. But the real problem here is that rather than the Republican governor pushing the lie and the Democratic attorney general defending the truth, the Democrat is going right along with the Republican and pushing the very same lie. And I can't help but wonder what Daylin Leach would say about this. Here we have a fighting progressive firebrand trying to push PA Democrats further left - and align us with potentially millions of people in PA who would get out and vote for once if they realized it meant legalized marijuana - and the first Democrat elected to the state-wide office of attorney general is trying to drag us back to the stone age with the conservatives. The coalition of Democratic voters
relies heavily on young voters, and young voters
heavily support legalization of marijuana. It's to the party's advantage to be seen as supporting it while Republicans oppose it. With this statement, I believe Kathleen Kane is prioritizing her own personal political ambitions over the health of the Democratic Party in PA as a whole as well as public policy outcomes that could positively impact people's lives. I see it as a big step backward in both arenas.
1:48 PM PT: I sent Daylin Leach a tweet to get his reaction to Kane's marijuana position, here is his response: