When two incompetent professionals get together to talk about marijuana, the propaganda they excrete can be amusing. From the mouths of the fully functional, this type of talk can be frustrating. But when reporters like Jayme West (KTAR.com) and Phoenix Drug Detective Matthew Shay take a stab at marijuana, it feels like an old, blind Chihuahua snapping at your ankles – more pathetic than threatening.

From KTAR.com:

It’s sung about and it’s talked about a lot on MySpace.com. What is it? It’s chronic.

“Chronic is essentially a generic name for high-grade marijuana,” says Poenix Police Drug Enforcement Detective Matthew Shay.

He says it also goes by the street names of bubble gum, afghanny and skunk.

It’s grown hydroponically rather than outdoors and it’s very potent.

The T.H.C. level in marijuana is what makes you feel high. “The T.H.C. level we had in marijuana back i the ’60s was estimated at two to sometimes five percent. Now I have recently had a T.H.C. level of chronic, high grade marijuana, at 28 percent.” (Did he just admit to smoking marijuana?)

This has been stated frequently in the media, and Slate.com had an excellent response to the claim in “The myth of potent pot.” Daniel Forbes explains the method used to come to this conclusion:

… is disingenuously comparing the best pot of today with the worst of yesterday, rather than comparing average marijuana of a generation ago with average marijuana now.

He’s ginning up the figures he wants by contrasting stuff you might line your cat’s litter box with to the alleged 30-percent pot—the likes of which a lucky (or rich) smoker might encounter once every several years.

Of course, Jayme West could not have known that Detective Shay was bullshitting her. But if Ms. West had been acting like a journalist, rather than the Detective’s puppet scribe, she might have asked Detective Shay why that would be significant.

When prohibitionists claim that marijuana used to be only 4 percent THC and now is a whopping 28-30 percent THC, they are implying that marijuana is in essence a different drug. They know that many older people tried marijuana when they were younger, suffered no ill effects, and consequently do not get too worked up about it. In order to scare these folks, they must be made to believe that, today, things are different. The government may have lied in the past, but today’s higher THC levels make marijuana a dangerous superweed.

By this reasoning, if you put down a beer (at 4% alcohol), and pick up a shot glass of whisky (at 40% alcohol), you have switched to an entirely different drug with entirely different effects.  It simply does not make sense.

Like any drug, it is the dose we ingest that will determine the effects, not the concentration. For example, when we drink whiskey (at 40% alcohol), we drink less liquid than when we drink beer.  In this respect, higher THC levels would be much healthier than lower levels because we would inhale less smoke.

More half-baked quotes:
“We see people driving around in Cadillacs and Hummers and whatever else that are selling . . . literally what we have is the profit margin with chronic.”(No English translation available)

“I’m talking about dozens of 18, 19, 20 year old kids who have been involved in shootouts over a couple of ounces of high grade marijuana.” (In Los Angeles they shoot each other over the color blue. The problem is probably a little deeper than Detective Shay is aware of.)

“What we don’t need is more violent crime anywhere, especially metro Phoenix.”(How can you argue with expertise like this?)