So what they are doing is switching to the legal drug, they are switching to alcohol. There is an increase in alcohol, that is the other side of it, as they are decreasing in marijuana.

Mr. MOORE. Congressman, we at the Scott Newman Center have long been opposed to media advertising of alcohol on television, et cetera. I mean we are not very good fans of Spud McKenzie or any of the other party animals. So in that sense, we need to be doing something directly about alcohol in terms of advertising on media. I think when you start talking about marijuana and you start talking about the legalization of marijuana, I think this is a Trojan horse, and this is an argument which misses the very basic nature of what marijuana is, which is that it is a highly social drug which is shared among people. And in doing so, what you are looking at is what has happened in our society I think over the last 10, 15, 20 years. You know, the great growth in marijuana use occurred becuase of the counter-culture, because of the fact we were mired in the middle of the Vietnam War, et cetera. This was a very distinct cultural period in which many people started using marijuana, you know. And anyone who ever used marijuana in those groups that used them, it was not "I am going to take a cigarette and it has one dose, I am going to take this marijuana cigarette and say, last week I had some Thai stick, it was a lot better than that, it was 10 times the dosage, it was a lot stronger, I got a lot higher." The demand is to get higher and higher.

That is something that is missed by the people advocating the legalization of marijuana and a very basic point. They want a higher high. I mean, that is part of the drug. It is not a cigarette which you smoke privately and a few minutes later you have a reacton in your nervous system.

Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Towns.

Mr. Towns. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Let me begin by first asking you, Mr. Miller, do you feel we have a war on drugs?

Mr. MILLER. Congressman Towns, we are in a war on drugs, and we are waging it on our own people. We now have an enormous amount of people that are going to jail and that number is on its way up. We spend $10 billion a year on it. We have it as the biggest law enforcement priority in the United States. We have tens of thousands of law enforcement officers, not the DEA, but the real front-line troops which are the police, the detectives and vice units all across America. They are interlocked with interlocking computer information networks.

We do have a war, but as has been said by Mr. Keating, as head of DEA, he said the other day:

We are not keeping one ounce less off the street. We can't keep it from coming in, you can't even keep it out of the prisons where people are searched all the time, they have checks where they go in and go out, even with their vistor strip checks and everything else.

Yes, we have a war, the war is not working. We need to look at different ways to approach it.

Mr. Towns. When you say you have a war, I must admit that I disagree with you. I think at best we have a skirmish-at best. When you talk about a war, you would have to talk about education and prevention, I think you have to talk about treatment, I

think you would have to talk about strong addiction programs, Crop substitution, et cetera, if you are talking about a war.

You only mentioned one aspect in terms of law enforcement, and I am wondering based on that if your proposal is not coming out of frustration.

Mr. MILLER. It is frustration in that marijuana has become-it was introduced, as my colleague said a moment ago, during the War era as a more prevalent part of our culture, but it has become part of our culture, and my frustration is that the 50 million users are criminals. Other than that, they are not in any way law breaking individuals.

A Texas Senator did a report for the Texas Legislature recently looking at how much they spend on marijuana users only and looked at the cost that they have for that program of theirs. And he determined that on a cost/benefit analysis, shall we say, that they weren't getting much for what they were doing. They were spending about $3600 on each defendant. There were one in every 10 people who used it, and what was happening is lives were being hurt more by criminalization in this particular substance than by the use itself.

Yes, I am frustrated because I think things need to be differentiated. I am frustrated when I taught at Cordoza High School about 18 years ago, a school near here in the inner city, when I was doing education to young people about drugs, and everybody else was treating them all the same, and I was saying, no, they are not all the same, I am not going to lie to you. I was having good success because I wasn't lying. I wasn't showing a scrambled egg and saying, this is marijuana, heroin, cocaine, they are all the same. That is not true. Kids don't believe it. Everybody says it.

As soon as you start talking about marijuana, I start talking about it in a situation like this, people slide into cocaine and so on. They are not the same. Let's tell them the truth. Let's separate it, let's make it available and not make these people criminals any

more.

Mr. Towns. Let me tell you my problem with it. First of all, you use an analogy, one beer and a sandwich. You don't get drunk from one glass of beer with a sandwich. It just doesn't happen.

The only reason one smokes marijuana, no matter how controlled, how regulated or who regulates it, is to get high.

Mr. MILLER. But people get high at different degrees, and if they know what they are doing with it, which is something that can be achieved by education, then they can do this, and most people do it in the privacy of their own homes and aren't bothering anyone else. We are in a society where we have people high on marijuana running around, and it is as available as alcohol to the population, that is the working population-and it is as available as alcohol to the kids because 88 percent report it is available to them if they want it. We don't have them out there causing the trouble. It is not the biggest industry problem. The legal drugs are the biggest industry problem, and that is because marijuana users, to a certain degree, have a greater sense of responsibility.

What I am advocating here is not that we sanction use. I advocate that we sanction reasoned education, that we sanction and changes our course and tell people you have to look at this in a

reasoned way, that we do the studies to understand what is the correlation between these things, which we don't really have in sufficient number right now, thought the most recent one-the Surgeon General seems to indicate I am correct on this-let's do more of that, and let's not in the process make these people criminals. We didn't make the wine drinkers doing kiddush on Friday night in prohibition criminals because they drank a cup of wine. We shouldn't do that to the marijuana smoker today.

Mr. GUARINI. I want to change the focus to Mrs. Whitfield.

You have an opinion about this, you have been through it allMr. Towns. One second. I got a question of Mrs. Whitfield too. I have a point here I want to finish.

Doesn't this bother you, first of all, that 95 percent of people that are on hard drugs, heroin, you name it, 95 percent studied by Rockefeller University some years ago indicated these people smoked marijuana first?

Mr. MILLER. That bothers me except for one thing, they also probably drank milk, and the most recent study on that says the largest gateway drug is not marijuana but is tobacco.

Mr. MOORE. That simply is not an excuse for legalization.

Mr. MILLER. What I am saying is that it is not excuse for criminalization, the people that use and do not go on to harder drugs, which are 50 million, do not and should not be criminalized for that reason, and that is the reason not to criminalize it.

Mr. Towns. Let me ask you this question, and I am going to let you go. I will let you deal with my colleague.

Doesn't it bother you-if that doesn't bother you, let me ask you this. Does this bother you, the fact there is no exaddicts calling for the legalization? Doesn't that bother you?

Mr. MILLER. No, I would not say that, because I do know ex-addicts who call for legalization.

Mr. Towns. Why don't you get them to come before this committee?

Mr. MILLER. I think that marijuana is considered different, by exaddicts, than other drugs, and I think-and I deal with ex-addicts in my private life all the time and current addicts in my current life all the time, and I deal with people in treatment all the time, that they have an agenda they have to deal with, that they are trying to achieve, and I do not have people that are of that view that are here today to address you. But they are out there. They are out there.

There are people, for example, that know individuals who are involved in heavy cocaine and crack use who, when they get off, would rather have them smoke marijuana than do alcohol. When I was in the Army, there was a General who called a committee together of officers: "Would you rather have your men smoke a joint at night, get up and be clear headed and go about their duties than get bombed on a couple gallons of tanqueray and get up and say, "Oh, man, sergeant, I am really bad this morning"? And the consensus was-I don't know any report was ever issued by that general, I don't remember his name.

Mr. RANGEL. There is no report. We would have read it.

Mr. MILLER. I am sure. This was in 1970. I am dating myself now. But the consensus of the young officers in that meeting,

which was informal, was that there is a more beneficial situation to the man in the morning if he smoked that joint at night than if he drank that gallon of booze, and some men were line officers who were back from Nam, some men were officers who were training and yet to go, and some people had a whole variety of experience. Mr. RANGEL. I am going to have to yield to Mr. Shaw, but I am certain that the same argument could be made for crack as opposed to heroin use.

Mr. MILLER. I don't think so.

Mr. WHITFIELD. May I say something as an ex-addict concerning this whole thing about reefer. I am definitely not here to support legalization of reefer, per se, but I am not taking any opinion about it. But I do feel that in talking about the legalization of marijuana for such an extensive time that we are missing the boat on some things that I really consider to be very, very dangerous, and I am one of those people that have been through the whole thing, I am in agreement with a lot of things they are saying concerning marijuana, but I think to talk about the legalization of marijuana, we are missing the boat on crack, we are missing the boat on cocaine, we are missing the boat on heroin, and I have never seen any one OD on reefer. I have OD'ed many times, but not from marijuana. Why do we keep messing with marijuana? We are talking about legalization of killers.

Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Whitfield, we will be getting back on track. Because marijuana is listed as an illegal drug, naturally when the chair asks these people to come and testify, they were invited, among others. But one of the reasons why, I would gather, I and other members of the panel have not questioned you is, one, because they agree with the testimony that you have given, but, two, because I have some very pointed questions to deal with the problems that you two have recognized individually and collectively and see for my community and country. Don't think I am passing

over you.

Mr. WHITFIELD. I felt sort of bad that marijuana was getting such a large bit of attention when I see it as a small piece of the problem.

Mr. RANGEL. They have a more sophisticated group of support

ers.

Mr. MILLER. We also have a larger share of the prohibition budget. Maybe it would be worthwhile to take a larger share of that budget and put it where it belongs, where Mr. Whitfield suggests, instead of prosecuting and persecuting marijuana users, take that budget and put it where it can go to better use.

Mr. SHAW. I find it interesting Mr. Miller would have compared one marijuana cigarette to consuming a gallon of gin. I would suggest that person who consumed a gallon of gin would not show up for work the next day.

The use of illegal drugs is well documented, well documented in my home district of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the Broward General Hospital as causing heart attacks, causing strokes, causing permanent brain damage. You know who I am talking about? I am talking about the premature babies dying and going through withdrawal at Broward General Hospital.

Don't tell me that what you do in the privacy of your own home doesn't hurt anybody. It does. I am sorry Dr. Brown is not here because the chairman has shared stories in his own district similar to what he saw when he came down for a hearing in Fort Lauderdale, and that is the damage it is doing to the unborn, the pregnant woman not knowing she is pregnant in the earliest stages of pregnancy still consuming cocaine and destroying the baby that is within her. That is one of the most intolerable sins of this generation I can ever see, and that is one of the prime reasons I feel it is so important we not under any consideration concern ourselves with the legalization of these drugs.

And the parallels that I see that are drawn between this and smoking and this and drinking and trying to throw this committee on the defensive to defend smoking and drinking, which it is not doing, I think is really begging the question and shows how desperate that you are to come up with an argument for legalization.

You point to another substance that we know maims and kills and saying if you do this, why not do ours too?

Mr. KAREL. I don't think

Mr. MILLER. That is not our position.

Mr. KAREL. I don't think that is the position. Again, I feel we should be allies, not opponents, that we are taking different paths to similar goals, which is reducing neonatal use of drugs and other problems.

Mr. SHAW. To me to say we should legalize that would be to use the analogy firecrackers are legal, so let's legalize dynamite.

Mr. KAREL. I understand the sentiments, I do understand the sentiments, and I am researching a book, and I am familiar and I talk to people who deal wth research on the neonatal effects of drugs, particularly cocaine, and there is evidence which is becoming stronger and stronger that cocaine use is damaging to the fetus and does mimic the fetal alcohol syndrome, and I do not think that pointing to alcohol or tobacco is a way of legitimatizing the use of other drugs.

I think the problem is when the emotions start to supplant a careful look at different drugs, different modes of use, when marijuana starts being confused with free-base cocaine or granular cocaine, when cocaine is confused with coca leaf-has anybody talked about how that is used and whether that has detrimental effects on users of coca leaf in Peru? This sounds like an obscure argument. I simply think it is important. I do not want to lock horns with the good Congressman or with any of the other representatives up there. Again, I sincerely believe that we have to try to look at this rationally. I do disagree with my colleague that what you do in the privacy of your home does not have negative effects, and I agree with you in that regard. I think it is very important. I do think we have to protect the unborn, particularly from all kinds of drug use, and one does not justify the other.

But what I see now is because of the legitimate concerns we don't take a deep breath and say, are we making this worse or better, how can we do this, what is the best way to do it?

Dr. MILLER. I join you in your concern. NORML does not stand for legalization of all drugs. It never has. That is not our position. Our position is let's look at this in a rational way, separate them