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Herb Ninja

Marijuana: The Myths Are Killing Us

4-26-2005 | Karen P. Tandy, Administrator, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Washington, D.C., and Chair, IACP Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Committee | DEA

APR 26--When 14-year-old Irma Perez of Belmont, California, took a single ecstasy pill one evening last April, she had no idea she would become one of the 26,000 people who die every year from drugs.1 Irma took ecstasy with two of her 14-year-old friends in her home. Soon after taking the tiny blue pill, Irma complained of feeling awful and said she felt like she was "going to die." Instead of seeking medical care, her friends called the 17-year-old dealer who supplied the pills and asked for advice. The friends tried to get Irma to smoke marijuana, but when she couldn't because she was vomiting and lapsing into a coma, they stuffed marijuana leaves into her mouth because, according to news sources, "they knew that drug is sometimes used to treat cancer patients."2

Irma Perez died from taking ecstasy, but compounding that tragedy was the deadly decision to use marijuana to "treat" her instead of making what could have been a lifesaving call to 911. Irma was a victim of our society's stunning misinformation about marijuana-a society that has come to believe that marijuana use is not only an individual's free choice but also is good medicine, a cure-all for a variety of ills. A recent poll showed that nearly three-fourths of Americans over the age of 45 support legalizing marijuana for medical use.3

It's a belief that has filtered down to many of our teens, if what I'm hearing during my visits with middle school and high school students across the country is true. I'm amazed at how well versed in drug legalization these teens are. It is as if legalization advocates stood outside their schools handing out their leaflets of lies. Here is what students have told me about marijuana: "It's natural because it grows in the ground, so it must be good for you." "It must be medicine, because it makes me feel better." "Since everybody says it's medicine, it is."

Legalization advocates themselves have alluded to the fact that so-called medical marijuana is a way of achieving wholesale drug legalization. A few years ago, the New York Times interviewed Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy research center. Responding to criticism that the so-called medical marijuana issue is a stalking horse for drug legalization, Mr. Nadelmann did not disagree. "Will it help lead toward marijuana legalization?" he asked. "I hope so."4

The issue of marijuana as medicine has captured the nation's attention and has now made its way to the U. S. Supreme Court, with Ashcroft v. Raich still pending.5 The natural extension of this myth is that, if marijuana is medicine, it must also be safe for recreational use. This pervasive mindset has even reached our courts. In January 2005, for example, Governor Frank Murkowski of Alaska had to ask the legislature "to overrule a court ruling that adult Alaskans have the right to possess marijuana for personal use in their homes."6 There was no pretense of medical use in this ruling; it gave Alaskans the legal right to smoke marijuana for any reason, lending credence to the belief that marijuana is not only safe to treat serious illness but somehow safe for general use and for all society.

What is the antidote? Spreading the truth. As a prominent spokesperson in your community, you have the opportunity and, I would argue, the responsibility to inform your neighbors. America is not suffering from anything that the truth can't cure. To help you set the record straight, this article seeks to rebut the rhetoric and recap the reality.

Myth: Marijuana is medicine.

Reality: Smoked marijuana is not medicine.
The scientific and medical communities have determined that smoked marijuana is a health danger, not a cure. There is no medical evidence that smoking marijuana helps patients. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved no medications that are smoked, primarily because smoking is a poor way to deliver medicine. Morphine, for example has proven to be a medically valuable drug, but the FDA does not endorse smoking opium or heroin.

Congress enacted laws against marijuana in 1970 based in part on its conclusion that marijuana has no scientifically proven medical value, which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed more than 30 years later in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, et al., 532 U.S. 483 (2001). Marijuana remains in schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act because it has a high potential for abuse, a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision, and no currently accepted medical value.7

The American Medical Association has rejected pleas to endorse marijuana as medicine, and instead urged that marijuana remain a prohibited schedule 1 drug at least until the results of controlled studies are in.8 The National Multiple Sclerosis Society stated that studies done to date "have not provided convincing evidence that marijuana benefits people with MS" and does not recommend it as a treatment.9 Further, the MS Society states that for people with MS "long-term use of marijuana may be associated with significant serious side effects."10

The British Medical Association has taken a similar position, voicing "extreme concern" that downgrading the criminal status of marijuana would "mislead" the public into thinking that the drug is safe to use when, "in fact, it has been linked to greater risk of heart disease, lung cancer, bronchitis, and emphysema."11

In 1999 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) undertook a landmark study reviewing the alleged medical properties of marijuana. Advocates of so-called medical marijuana frequently tout this study, but the study's findings decisively undercut their arguments. In truth, the IOM explicitly found that marijuana is not medicine and expressed concern about patients' smoking it because smoking is a harmful drug-delivery system. The IOM further found that there was no scientific evidence that smoked marijuana had medical value, even for the chronically ill, and concluded that "there is little future in smoked marijuana as a medically approved medication."12 In fact, the researchers who conducted the study could find no medical value to marijuana for virtually any ailment they examined, including the treatment of wasting syndrome in AIDS patients, movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy, or glaucoma.

The IOM found that THC13 (the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana) in smoked marijuana provides only temporary relief from intraocular pressure (IOP) associated with glaucoma and would have to be smoked eight to 10 times a day to achieve consistent results. And there exists another treatment for IOP, as the availability of medically approved once- or twice-a-day eye drops makes IOP control a reality for many patients and provides round-the-clock IOP reduction.14 For two other conditions, nausea and pain, the report recommended against marijuana use, while suggesting further research in limited circumstances for THC but not smoked marijuana.15

Before any drug can be marketed in the United States, it must undergo rigorous scientific scrutiny and clinical evaluation overseen by the FDA. For example, the FDA has approved Marinol (dronabinol)-a safe capsule form of synthetic THC that meets the standard of accepted medicine and has the same properties as cultivated marijuana without the high- for the treatment of nausea and vomiting associated with cancer chemotherapy and for the treatment of wasting syndrome in AIDS patients.

The federal government has approved and continues to approve research into the possible use of marijuana as medicine and any new delivery systems of marijuana's active ingredients. To quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's remarks during the November 2004 Raich oral argument, "Medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum."16 Proving that the regulatory process does work, DEA has registered every researcher who meets FDA standards to use marijuana in scientific studies. Since 2000, for example, the California-based Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR) has gained approval for 14 trials using smoked marijuana in human beings and three trials in laboratory and animal models.17 This CMCR research is the first effort to study the medical efficacy of marijuana. But researchers have not endorsed smoking marijuana and instead are attempting to isolate marijuana's active ingredients to develop alternative delivery systems to smoking.18 Not one of these researchers has found scientific proof that smoke marijuana is medicine.

Myth: Legalization of marijuana in other countries has been a success.

Reality: Liberalization of drug laws in other countries has often resulted in higher use of dangerous drugs. Over the past decade, drug policy in some foreign countries, particularly those in Europe, has gone through some dramatic changes toward greater liberalization with failed results. Consider the experience of the Netherlands, where the government reconsidered its legalization measures in light of that country's experience. After marijuana use became legal, consumption nearly tripled among 18- to 20-year-olds. As awareness of the harm of marijuana grew, the number of cannabis coffeehouses in the Netherlands decreased 36 percent in six years. Almost all Dutch towns have a cannabis policy, and 73 percent of them have a no-tolerance policy toward the coffeehouses.20

In 1987 Swiss officials permitted drug use and sales in a Zurich park, which was soon dubbed Needle Park, and Switzerland became a magnet for drug users the world over. Within five years, the number of regular drug users at the park had reportedly swelled from a few hundred to 20,000. The area around the park became crime-ridden to the point that the park had to be shut down and the experiment terminated.21

Marijuana use by Canadian teenagers is at a 25-year peak in the wake of an aggressive decriminalization movement. At the very time a decriminalization bill was before the House of Commons, the Canadian government released a report showing that marijuana smoking among teens is "at levels that we haven't seen since the late '70s when rates reached their peak."22 After a large decline in the 1980s, marijuana use among teens increased during the 1990s, as young people apparently became "confused about the state of federal pot laws."23

Myth: Marijuana is harmless.

Reality: Marijuana is dangerous to the user.
Use of marijuana has adverse health, safety, social, academic, economic, and behavioral consequences; and children are the most vulnerable to its damaging effects. Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in America24 and is readily available to kids.25 Compounding the problem is that the marijuana of today is not the marijuana of the baby boomers 30 years ago. Average THC levels rose from less than 1 percent in the mid-1970s to more than 8 percent in 2004.26 And the potency of B.C. Bud,a popular type of marijuana cultivated in British Columbia, Canada, is roughly twice the national average-ranging from 15 percent THC content to 20 percent or even higher.27

Marijuana use can lead to dependence and abuse. Marijuana was the second most common illicit drug responsible for drug treatment admissions in 2002-outdistancing crack cocaine, the next most prevalent cause.28 Shocking to many is that more teens are in treatment each year for marijuana dependence than for alcohol and all other illegal drugs combined.29 This is a trend that has been increasing for more than a decade: in 2002, 64 percent of adolescent treatment admissions reported marijuana as their primary substance of abuse, compared to 23 percent in 1992.30

Marijuana is a gateway drug. In drug law enforcement, rarely do we meet heroin or cocaine addicts who did not start their drug use with marijuana. Scientific studies bear out our anecdotal findings. For example, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, based on a study of 300 sets of twins, that marijuana-using twins were four times more likely than their siblings to use cocaine and crack cocaine, and five times more likely to use hallucinogens such as LSD.31 Furthermore, the younger a person is when he or she first uses marijuana, the more likely that person is to use cocaine and heroin and become drug-dependent as an adult. One study found that 62 percent of the adults who first tried marijuana before they were 15 were likely to go on to use cocaine. In contrast, only 1 percent or less of adults who never tried marijuana used heroin or cocaine.32

Smoking marijuana can cause significant health problems. Marijuana contains more than 400 chemicals, of which 60 are cannabinoids.33 Smoking a marijuana cigarette deposits about three to five times more tar into the lungs than one filtered tobacco cigarette.34 Consequently, regular marijuana smokers suffer from many of the same health problems as tobacco smokers, such as chronic coughing and wheezing, chest colds, and chronic bronchitis.35 In fact, studies show that smoking three to four joints per day causes at least as much harm to the respiratory system as smoking a full pack of cigarettes every day.36 Marijuana smoke also contains 50 to 70 percent more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than tobacco smoke and produces high levels of an enzyme that converts certain hydrocarbons into malignant cells.37

In addition, smoking marijuana can lead to increased anxiety, panic attacks, depression, social withdrawal, and other mental health problems, particularly for teens.38 Research shows that kids aged 12 to 17 who smoke marijuana weekly are three times more likely than nonusers to have suicidal thoughts.39 Marijuana use also can cause cognitive impairment, to include such short-term effects as distorted perception, memory loss, and trouble with thinking and problem solving. Students with an average grade of D or below were found to be more than four times as likely to have used marijuana in the past year as youths who reported an average grade of A.40 For young people, whose brains are still developing, these effects are particularly problematic and jeopardize their ability to achieve their full potential.41

Myth: Smoking marijuana harms only the smokers.

Reality: Marijuana use harms nonusers.
We need to put to rest the thought that there is such a thing as a lone drug user, a person whose habits affect only himself or herself. Drug use, including marijuana use, is not a victimless crime. Some in your communities may resist involvement because they think someone else's drug use is not hurting them. But this kind of not-my-problem thinking is tragically misguided. Ask those same people about secondhand smoke from cigarettes, and they'll quickly acknowledge the harm that befalls nonsmokers. Secondhand smoke is a well-known problem, one that Americans are becoming more unwilling to bear. We need to apply the same common-sense thinking to the even more pernicious secondhand effects of drug use.

Take for instance the disastrous effects of marijuana smoking on driving. As the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) noted, "Epidemiology data from . . . traffic arrests and fatalities indicate that after alcohol, marijuana is the most frequently detected psychoactive substance among driving populations."42 Marijuana causes drivers to experience decreased car handling performance, increased reaction times, distorted time and distance estimation, sleepiness, impaired motor skills, and lack of concentration.43

The extent of the problem of marijuana-impaired driving is startling. One in six (or 600,000) high school students drive under the influence of marijuana, almost as many as drive under the influence of alcohol, according to estimates released in September 2003 by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).44 A study of motorists pulled over for reckless driving showed that, among those who were not impaired by alcohol, 45 percent tested positive for marijuana.45

For those of you who patrol streets and highways, you know that the consequences of marijuana-impaired driving can be tragic. For example, four children and their van driver-nicknamed Smokey by the children for his regular marijuana smoking-died in April 2002 when a Tippy Toes Learning Academy van veered off a freeway and hit a concrete bridge abutment. He was found at the crash scene with marijuana in his pocket.46

Some such drug-impaired drivers will be detected through the Drug Recognition Expert program, which operates under the direction of the IACP and is supported by NHTSA.47 However, if we are to bolster cases against drugged drivers, greater protection for innocents on the road requires the development of affordable roadside drug detection tests, and some are in the testing phase now.

Secondhand smoke from marijuana kills other innocents as well. Last year, two Philadelphia firefighters were killed when they responded to a residential fire stemming from an indoor marijuana grow.48 In New York City, an eight-year-old boy, Deasean Hill, was killed by a stray bullet just steps from his Brooklyn home after a drug dealer sold a dime bag of marijuana on another dealer's turf.49

Chief: Help Spread the Truth about Marijuana
Debunking these myths and arming our young people and their parents with the facts do work. We have proof. It came in the form of good news from the Monitoring the Future survey that reveals that marijuana use has dropped 36 percent among eighth graders since 1996, and modestly declined among 10th and 12th graders.50 It is no coincidence that while marijuana use declined, the proportion of students perceiving marijuana use as dangerous increased.51 "Quite possibly, the media campaign aimed at marijuana use that has been undertaken by ONDCP, in collaboration with the Partnership for a Drug Free America, has been having its intended effect," University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston, the study's principal investigator, said.52 Research also shows that parental disapproval can prevent teen drug use. Most young people (89 percent) reported that their parents strongly disapprove of their trying marijuana. Among these youths, only 5 percent had used marijuana in the past month.53

Spread the truth. Join with your community leaders. Clear the smokescreen by educating the children, parents, teachers, physicians, and legislators in your community before the myths kill any more Irma Perezes or Deasean Hills.

__________________
Ron Paul for the Long Haul

 

Higher Logic

Wow. So now they're trying to flip the tables by saying we pass out lies. That's ridiculous, they'll seriously do anything won't they? Souless bastards.

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hauptmann

Sounds like they are straight gunning this sites myth page.

They just like to make the waters cloudy. When propaganda and disinformation dont work, try, try again.

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Stephanie S.

Well, because in many cases, they are big fat liars.

Myth: Legalization of marijuana in other countries has been a success.

Reality: Liberalization of drug laws in other countries has often resulted in higher use of dangerous drugs. Over the past decade, drug policy in some foreign countries, particularly those in Europe, has gone through some dramatic changes toward greater liberalization with failed results. Consider the experience of the Netherlands, where the government reconsidered its legalization measures in light of that country's experience.False!!! After marijuana use became legal, consumption nearly tripled among 18- to 20-year-olds.FALSE!! As awareness of the harm of marijuana grew, the number of cannabis coffeehouses in the Netherlands decreased 36 percent in six years. Almost all Dutch towns have a cannabis policy, and 73 percent of them have a no-tolerance policy toward the coffeehouses.


From http://www.drugtext.org/library/articles/97834.htm
Since 1969 there have been over a dozen surveys on drug use in the Netherlands, two of which offer support for his claim. One 1984 survey found that 4.4% of Dutch youth had tried cannabis, while a different 1992 survey by the Dutch National Institute on Alcohol and Drugs (NIAD) found that 10.6% had done so (4) However, prevalence figures in the other surveys varied widely. As NIAD itself admits, most of the surveys used different samples and methods, which may make their findings non-comparable from year to year. The only survey on drug use that employs rigorously comparable sampling and methods each time it is administered is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Health and conducted on the general population of Amsterdam (the city with the highest concentration of coffeeshops). These surveys found that the proportion of youth aged 12-15 years who had ever tried cannabis was 4.7% in 1987, 2.9% in 1990, and 5.8% in 1994. (5) Among youth aged 16-19 years, the figures were 25.5% in 1987, 21.7% in 1990, and 28.7% in 1994.' Rather than a'200%'jump in cannabis use, these surveys show first a modest decline in lifetime prevalence and, four years hence, a modest increase.


In 1987 Swiss officials permitted drug use and sales in a Zurich park, which was soon dubbed Needle Park, and Switzerland became a magnet for drug users the world over. Within five years, the number of regular drug users at the park had reportedly swelled from a few hundred to 20,000. The area around the park became crime-ridden to the point that the park had to be shut down and the experiment terminated.21

This whole idea was just asinine, of course it was going to fail! Put all the junkies in a park and let em stick each other all day abd be wasted in public...yeahh yeah, that's the ticket.


Marijuana use by Canadian teenagers is at a 25-year peak in the wake of an aggressive decriminalization movement. At the very time a decriminalization bill was before the House of Commons, the Canadian government released a report showing that marijuana smoking among teens is "at levels that we haven't seen since the late '70s when rates reached their peak."22 After a large decline in the 1980s, marijuana use among teens increased during the 1990s, as young people apparently became "confused about the state of federal pot laws."23
I wonder if, when they changed the sample size from 15,000 to 25,000 kids they altered anything else in their study... Statistics schmatistics, gimme a skewer, I can skew numbers anyway ya want, if you pay me enough.


Why isn't this on the front page? Stellar article!


peace

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"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." —George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005 (Listen to audio)

Herb Ninja

It doesn't start off talking about the people shot by DEA agents in marijuana raids. It doesn't talk about the medical marijuana patients who are suffering because the DEA took away their medicine. No, it starts off by talking about a kid that they claim died from ecstacy. The reason they say this correlates to marijuana is because when the kid started to feel like she "was going to die" her friends tried to get her to smoke marijuana, because, according to news sources, "they knew that drug is sometimes used to treat cancer patients." Ms. Tandy claims that the kid "was a victim of our society's stunning misinformation about marijuana-a society that has come to believe that marijuana use is not only an individual's free choice but also is good medicine, a cure-all for a variety of ills." If anything can spin a story about a kid dying from ecstacy into a claim that the kid was a victim of society's misinformation about marijuana, its the DEA.

Next Ms. Tandy goes on to talk about why smoked marijuana is not medicine. She points out the fact that the FDA has never approved medicine that is injested via smoking it. Although she neglects to point out all the states and other countries that have approved medical marijuana for some conditions. She neglects to point out that Sativex, a medicine derived from marijuana, has recently been approved in Canada. She just points to studies that will support her claims that marijuana isn't medicine and then exaggerates the amount of research our government is doing.

Later in the article she says "the liberalization of drug laws in other countries has often resulted in higher use of dangerous drugs" and that the claim "the legalization of marijuana in other countries has been a success" is a myth. The legalization of marijuana should not be about decreasing use, nor should it be considered unsucessful if use increases when people are not arrested for buying marijuana. Legalization takes marijuana off the black market, where criminals can exploit its illegality to make absurd profits selling marijuana for more then its weight in gold. Ending marijuana prohibition means that cops don't have to die raiding huge illegal marijuana plantations guarded by armed criminals. It means that innocent people won't get shot in DEA home raids over some marijuana plants. It means more jobs and a better economy. It means better purity and immeasurably more ease in acquiring marijuana for research. The benefits of ending marijuana prohibition would far exceed any increased usage that may result from legalization.

Her article is further riddled with stereotypes and DEA propaganda. "Marijuana is a gateway drug." "Marijuana use harms nonusers." She says "Clear the smokescreen by educating the children, parents, teachers, physicians, and legislators in your community before the myths kill any more Irma Perezes or Deasean Hills." I agree there is a smokescreen that needs to be cleared by education before more people are killed. But this smokescreen isn't coming from legalization advocates, its coming from people like Ms. Tandy - And the longer it takes for this smokescreen of lies that our government has clouded our country in to clear, the more people that will die as a result of this frivolous war on drugs. Peace, HN-

 

Stephanie S.

HN, that was a really great post...well written, concise and thoughtful.


peace

Cassius

Factual reality: Marijuana is not the first medicine to be widely smoked. Ask Mamabudz. Didn't inhalers or something used to be done via the smoking process? I remember it was something...

Factual reality: Of course drug use is going to go up in the period immediately following decriminilization! If a government has been saying something is bad for decades and all of a sudden reverses its position (or begins to reverse it), of course more people are going to try it! That's not deduction, that's common sense.

If you want to deduct a causal link, you have to look at a place where it has been legal for a long time, that way you don't have all the "newcomers" that are trying it out of curiosity because it used to be illegal. And if you look at the country that has had it legal for a long time... guess what you find? Drug use AND abuse rates (both) are actually LOWER than in the US!

I don't know of anyone who thinks or advocates that marijuana is completely harmless. Obviously, every drug has side effects. Just ask the pharmaceutical industry! But America used to be about letting everyone be adult enough to make their own decisions about life and what they want to ingest. Furthermore, even the pharmaceutical industry will tell you that there are times when side effects are acceptable if it provides a net good -- like taking away the DEBILITATING pain of multiple sclerosis, or the DANGEROUS hunger of an AIDS or cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy. In fact, marijuana has less side effects than almost EVERY drug the pharmaceutical industry has to offer! Add on top of that the fact that marijuana is only mildly psychologically addictive, and not physically addictive at all, and you won't see me running for Walgreens when I've got a sinus headache!

The only two arguments they even attempt to give here are: marijuana-impaired driving, and secondhand smoke.

First of all, marijuana-impaired driving is certainly bad, as is alcohol-impaired driving, but that says nothing about the value of marijuana. I imagine that sniffing gasoline (yes there are people who do this, it's an example but you can insert your own choice of deviant activity here) would impair driving as well -- but you don't see the government trying to close down gas stations all over the country, do you?

Just because something can't be done while driving doesn't mean it should be outlawed. There are lots of things that have negative effects on driving, that doesn't mean that if certain people are stupid enough to drive while doing them that we should outlaw the activities completely. Or else it would be illegal in this country to operate heavy machinery of any kind, drive during foul weather, drive while talking on cell phones (well, they're working on this one, and I can't say I completely disagree). But you don't ban all cell phones in the country just because it's dangerous to drive while using one.

Secondly, secondhand smoke is, again, tangential to the issue of the merits of marijuana. Most smokers I know smoke in the privacy of their own homes (I wonder why?), and as such, are posing no public health risk with their secondhand smoke. Shall we make bonfires and camping illegal also? Wood smoke is much much worse for the lungs than secondhand marijuana smoke is.

Yes, let's ALL shout the truth from the rooftops and see who comes out on top, shall we?

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Niteshift

Can I ask a serious question about the first part: does anyone think the teen dealer in the story did the right thing by giving her pot during an overdoes instead of giving her help? Shouldn't he be looking at criminal charges related to the death?

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PotShot

SOURCE
BELMONT
Teen in ecstasy case to stand trial as juvenile
- Ryan Kim, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, September 10, 2004


A San Mateo County judge Thursday said a 17-year-old boy charged with supplying a fatal overdose of ecstasy to a Belmont girl would be tried as a juvenile and not as an adult because he is a prime candidate for rehabilitation, and she does not want to "throw away a young man's life.''

Prosecutors had pushed to have the Belmont teenager tried as an adult in connection with the death of 14-year-old Irma Perez, who died after taking a single ecstasy pill allegedly supplied by the boy during a sleepover April 23.

Judge Marta Diaz made her decision after hearing testimony alleging the severity and sophistication of the teenager's drug dealing and his failure to give proper aid to Perez. Diaz also considered his clean criminal record and potential for rehabilitation before concluding that he should be placed in the juvenile justice system.

"In death, Irma Perez gave life to five others who received organ transplants," Diaz said. "This court will not throw away a young man's life in her name. That would be a travesty."

The ruling means the boy faces a maximum of three years in the California Youth Authority. Had he been tried as an adult for involuntary manslaughter, providing drugs to a minor and other drug charges, he could have been sentenced to 10 or more years in state prison if found guilty. He is scheduled to return to court Oct. 28 for a pretrial conference.

Irma's older sister, Imelda Perez, said she was surprised and disappointed by Diaz's ruling.

"For me, I see him as an adult," she said. "He acted as an adult. He clearly knew (ecstasy) could kill people."

During Thursday's hearing, police officers and others testified that Perez and two friends had gathered at one of the girl's homes for a sleepover. Perez's friends had purchased the ecstasy earlier in the day, and the three took the pills at about 9:30 p.m., police said. Perez began experiencing severe pain a short time later, and her two friends called the boy.

He arrived in the middle of the night and downplayed the problem, according to police. He tried to give Irma marijuana and water to help her before leaving a couple of hours later, police said.

By the morning, the mother of one of the girls called Perez's sister when she heard Irma's screams. Imelda Perez rushed her unconscious sister to the hospital, where she was pronounced brain-dead. An autopsy found she had died of an ecstasy overdose.

Prosecutor Elizabeth Raffaelli tried to paint the boy as a sophisticated and callous predator, concerned only with saving his own hide and continuing his sales.

"Three years is not enough to hold someone accountable for this type of offense," Raffaelli argued.

But defense attorney Vincent O'Malley said Diaz's decision was just.

O'Malley said his client "is amenable to rehabilitation and treatment, and he's manifested this since the first day he was arrested."

Last month, Antonio Rivera, a 20-year-old drug supplier for the teenager, pleaded no contest to various drug charges and will face up to eight years in prison. The two 14-year-old girls who gave the ecstasy to Irma were sentenced to rehabilitation programs. Rivera's girlfriend, Angelique Malabey, 18, has pleaded no contest to hiding drugs for Rivera after he was arrested.

E-mail Ryan Kim at rkim@sfchronicle.com.

-----
I found a couple other articles, but couldnt find the "stuffing marijuana leaves into her mouth" part of the story... maybe its made up? Whatever the case education would have helped a wee bit in this situation, or maybe the stigma against drugs discouraged Irma's friends from getting medical assistance. If ectasy was legal maybe Irma would have lived? Or maybe if her friends were not cowards. Whatever the case, it seems a bad starting point for an argument to justify the continued prohibition of cannabis.

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Cassius

I also would like to point out that I don't think trying to give her marijuana to combat the ecstacy was such a bad idea. Not to get into an off-topic discussion, but the effects of marijuana largely DO combat the effects of ecstacy... well, some of them.

There's nothing better after a night out at a rave with no sleep than chilling the next day with a bag of weed to let you mellow out and calm down, before crashing for a long 16- or 20-hour nap. =)

I wouldn't say it's a "cure-all", but I do believe that it helps a large number of conditions.

Furthermore, contrary to popular propaganda, in my opinion drug users tend to know a LOT more about the substances they take than the government, prohibitionists, and especially journalists writing in the name of prohibition.

Disclaimer: Obviously, if the girl was unconscious or displaying life-threatening symptoms, a call to 911 was in order. But as a general rule, I can see where marijuana is useful to mellow somebody out on ecstacy, and I can understand kids thinking of that and trying it as a resolution. The fact that her condition obviously WAS life-threatening means that they should have recognized that fact and taken her to a hospital, but I can understand why they tried what they did, and I wouldn't call it bad judgment or misinformation or ignorance -- I would just call it... underestimation of the severity of the situation.