From: [w--li--h] at [ix.netcom.com] (William House ) Newsgroups: alt.law-enforcement,alt.drugs,alt.drugs.culture,alt.drugs.pot,rec.drugs.cannabis,rec.drugs.misc,rec.drugs.psychedelic,talk.politics.drugs,talk.politics.libertarian,talk.politics.misc Subject: War on Marijuana promotes teen alcohol use. Date: 26 Oct 1995 11:57:02 GMT here's an interesting article: gopher://hemp.uwec.edu:70/00/drugs/war-on-drugs/pot.alcohol Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company The New York Times June 17, 1992, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 1; Financial Desk LENGTH: 823 words HEADLINE: Economic Scene; Less Marijuana, More Alcohol? BYLINE: By Peter Passell BODY: WHAT do teen-agers do when they are priced out of the market for marijuana? Some, presumably, take oboe lessons or join the 4-H Club. But others look for solace in less wholesome pursuits. And, surprisingly, economists may have more to say on the subject than toilers in the fields of psychology or criminology. Drug policy is grounded on the premise that illicit drugs are birds of a feather -- that reducing the availability of one decreases the consumption of others. But economists who measure the demand for illicit substances the way, say, Exxon analyzes the demand for grades of gasoline, challenge this conventional wisdom. Their identification of a strong substitution effect between marijuana and alcohol suggests that the full court press against the weed is partly responsible for stubbornly high levels of binge drinking by teen- agers. According to the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, the proportion of high school seniors regularly using marijuana fell to 14 percent last year, barely one-third the rate reported in 1978. Their use of alcohol has been on the wane, too, slipping by a fourth since the late 1970's. This might seem proof that alcohol and marijuana drugs are complements --more like bread and jam than cake and pie. But simple correlation cannot account for the slew of factors that influence drug consumption over time and place. That is where a yet-to-be-published study by John DiNardo of the University of California at Irvine and Thomas Lemieux of Princeton fits in. Their work, supported by the Rand Corporation and the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, focuses on the mid-1980's, when the threat of losing Federal highway aid forced states to adopt a uniform minimum drinking age. In 1980, 1/2 the states had minimum drinking ages ranging from 18 to 20. Eight years later, all states were up to age 21. The two economists estimated demand curves for marijuana and alcohol, using a variety of data that might influence consumption -- everything from parents' education to unemployment rates -- to isolate the effect of drinking sanctions. The good news is that the higher "price" for alcohol -- that is, the greater difficulty of obtaining it -- reduced drinking. The bad news: Other factors being equal, raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 increased the proportion of high school seniors who smoked marijuana by an estimated 10 percent. To Peter Reuter, an economist at Rand, this conclusion is most interesting for what it implies about marijuana policy in the 1980's. If marijuana is a substitute for alcohol, he notes, alcohol is, by definition, a substitute for marijuana. Thus tough marijuana enforcement must increase drinking. And, indeed, another new study for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Karen Model suggests Mr. Reuter is on the mark. Ms. Model, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, examined the impact of marijuana decriminalization on hospital emergency room admissions for drug abuse reported to the Federal Drug Abuse Warning Network in the mid-1970's. And as the substitution hypothesis would suggest, Ms. Model found that emergency room episodes related to drugs other than marijuana were 12 percent lower in the states that had decriminalized the weed. Lowering the effective "price" of marijuana, she concluded, reduced the abuse of other substances. The data did not allow Ms. Model to isolate alcohol emergencies from those caused by the use of heroin, cocaine or prescription chemicals. But Ms. Model believes alcohol is far and away the most likely drug replaced by marijuana. Both alcohol and marijuana were widely seen by users as "soft" recreational drugs, in contrast to, say, cocaine, heroin or LSD. Marijuana and alcohol use are both down; why, then, worry? Because the level of teen-age alcohol abuse remains remarkably high. In 1991, some 30 percent of high school seniors reported having had five or more drinks in a row sometime in the previous two weeks. The comparable figure for college students (almost all of whom had to break the law to obtain alcohol is 43 percent -- and there is no downward trend. To those who focus on the risk of accidental injury and other medical crises, heavy drinking seems a more serious worry than marijuana. Ms. Model found that other factors equal, states decriminalizing marijuana reported lower overall rates of drug- and alcohol-related emergencies. And while both substances have been implicated in auto accidents, Frank Chaloupka, an economist at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, believes that substitution toward marijuana is, on balance, a life saver. In a statistical analysis that parallels Ms. Model's, he found that states without criminal sanctions against marijuana possession suffered fewer auto fatalities. "If the choice is more marijuana use or more dead teen-agers," Mr. Reuter concludes, "the choice is easy." [end of article]