NORML says "hogwash" to the new British Medical Journal "Scare Mongering" Editorial alleging that pot contributes to 30,000 deaths per year in the U.K.

London, United Kingdom: NORML Foundation Executive Director Allen St. Pierre criticized an editorial published today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) hypothesizing that marijuana smoking may be responsible for an estimated 30,000 deaths a year in the UK, primarily due to heart and respiratory illnesses.

"This editorial is scare mongering at its worst," said St. Pierre. "The authors of this editorial admit they have no scientific evidence to back up their claims. By far the greatest danger to health posed by the use of marijuana stems from a criminal arrest and conviction."

Although the editorial's authors acknowledge that there is a "dearth of epidemiological evidence" demonstrating pot's health hazards, and that case-controlled studies regarding marijuana's impact on health are rare, they still contend that marijuana poses a serious physical and mental health hazard. "One could calculate that if cigarettes cause an annual excess of 120,000 deaths among 13 million smokers (in the United Kingdom), the corresponding figures for deaths among 3.2 million cannabis smokers would be 30,000, assuming equality of effect," they opined.

Authors' extrapolations did not account for the fact that average tobacco smokers consume far more tobacco over the course of their lifetimes than marijuana smokers consume cannabis.

A previous large-scale population study of marijuana use and mortality conducted by Kaiser Permanente and published in the American Journal of Public Health found that marijuana use, even long-term, "showed little if any effect ... on non-AIDS mortality in men and on total mortality in women." In addition, a 1999 report by the US National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine concluded, "There is no conclusive evidence that marijuanacauses cancer in humans, including cancers usually related to tobacco use."

A pair of editorials published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, reached a similar conclusion, finding: "The smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health. S It would be reasonable to judge cannabis as less of a threat S than alcohol or tobacco."

For more information, please contact either Allen St. Pierre or Paul Armentano of The NORML Foundation at (202) 483-8751.