Behavior: More Controversy About Pot

Undaunted by the criticism that followed publication in April of their report on the adverse effects of marijuana, two Philadelphia psychiatrists last week strongly reiterated their case. Testifying in Washington before the Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, Harold Kolansky and William Moore again insisted that pot can produce serious emotional disturbance, even psychosis, in young users with no history of psychiatric illness. This time the opposition was even better prepared. Seven psychiatrists, all prominent in the drug abuse field, vigorously denounced the anti-pot report.

Kolansky and Moore insisted that "mental changes—disturbed awareness of self, apathy, confusion and poor reality testing—will occur in an individual who smokes marijuana on a regular basis whether he is a normal adolescent, an adolescent in conflict, or a severely neurotic individual. Those who are already ill," they said, "will become additionally affected and thereby reduce their chance for recovery. Those who are balancing between mental health and illness will lose their balance, and those who are healthy will eventually become symptomatic after prolonged exposure to the toxicity of marijuana." In addition, Kolansky appeared to dispute the widely held belief of drug experts that marijuana users do not generally escalate to heroin. "If nothing is done to strengthen marijuana enforcement," he said, "heroin addiction will become as epidemic in two years as marijuana is now."

Amateurish Criticism. Leaping to the attack, the opposing psychiatrists emphasized that the Philadelphia study covered the behavior of only 38 of the millions who have experimented with pot. Said Leon Wurmser, scientific director of the Johns Hopkins Drug Abuse Center: "There is no systematic quantitative study which would allow any conclusion as to a cause-and-effect relationship between marijuana use and serious mental problems." Professor Norman Zinberg of Harvard pointed out that the Kolansky-Moore findings could be applied to beer drinkers as well as pot users, and San Francisco Psychiatrist Joel Fort said that the study contained "inaccurate and inflammatory statements" as well as "amateurish social criticism that might have been written by Vice President Agnew's speechwriters."

The commissioners, who are to advise Congress on whether or not to legalize pot, were impressed by the testimony of Kolansky and Moore. Their view was reinforced by the nation's chief narcotics enforcement officer, Director John Ingersoll of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, who testified that pot can be "psychologically habituating, often resulting in an antimotivational syndrome in which the user is more apt to contemplate a flower pot than try to solve his problem."