By Ed and Jim Gogek

An open letter to Zonker Harris:

Zonker, it’s time someone talked straight about your marijuana problem. As a character in the Doonesbury comic strip, you’ve often joked about your own pot smoking, but we always thought the problem was worse than you let on.

Then on Dec. 29, when you dropped your fuzzy, laid-back smile and angrily argued that marijuana is “a non-addictive drug that kills nobody,” it convinced us that you’re a comic strip character hiding a serious problem. We’ll put it to you straight, Zonk: You’re in denial—both about your own marijuana use and what it does to thousands of others.

Maybe the prohibition against medical use of marijuana is ridiculous. But on nearly everything else you’re wrong.

You say marijuana isn’t addictive? Ask anyone who works in addiction treatment if they ever diagnose cannabis dependence, the psychiatric term for someone who can’t quit smoking marijuana. It’s actually common. There are a lot of daily pot-smokers who start first thing in the morning and stay stoned round the clock, and many of them can’t quit without addiction treatment.

Cannabis addicts are often embarrassed to ask for help because they think marijuana is not supposed to be addictive. So when you repeat this misinformation in the funnies, you make it even harder for marijuana addicts to get help and easier for occasional users to ignore the very real risk of addiction.

Marijuana addicts also see psychiatrists because they suffer from problems that chronic marijuana use causes -- depression, panic attacks, and, strangely enough, outbursts of uncontrollable rage. And they usually have no idea that marijuana can cause these problems.

You’re right, Zonker, that alcohol and tobacco are legal, and in many ways more harmful than marijuana. But so what if marijuana is less bad? Do we really want another legal drug to abuse? Marijuana may not be as addictive or dangerous as cocaine or alcohol, and it kills fewer people, but that’s hardly a selling point. Should we legalize petty theft because it’s not as bad as grand larceny?

You say marijuana never killed anybody? A study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at people arrested for reckless driving who hadn’t been drinking. Although many were on several illegal drugs, one-third of them tested positive only for marijuana, clear evidence that it impairs driving. For the more than 50,000 people killed in car accidents each year, alcohol is the main culprit. But if marijuana can cause such a high rate of reckless driving, it must take its own share of lives. How many traffic fatalities marijuana causes we don’t know; police don’t test for it and coroners don’t regularly report it.

Another study in the Journal of Addictive Diseases found that greater frequency of marijuana use among inner-city kids was associated with a greater likelihood to commit violent offenses. The more we learn about marijuana, the less benign it seems.

Research shows that regular marijuana users have serious life problems. In school their grades are worse, at work their thinking is unclear, in relationships they can’t communicate. They have low self-esteem and feel disconnected from friends and family. They tend to be underemployed in unchallenging jobs. It’s not the violence seen with cocaine- and alcohol-addicts, but the loss of a productive life is equally tragic.

Any of this sound familiar, Zonker? You haven’t held a real job since you left college 30 years ago. You’ve never had a relationship, you completely lack ambition, and you still live with your parents when you’re not mooching off B.D. and Boopsie.

Remember how movies used to make alcoholics look cute and funny? Today we know that alcoholism is serious, and movies now show alcoholics with terrible problems and painful lives. Zonker, maybe you should learn more about the real lives of marijuana addicts and start portraying them more honestly. Show us the panic anxiety and social isolation. See a counselor for a life that’s going nowhere. Admit you can’t imagine living without the stuff. Otherwise you’re telling your readers that a harmful, addictive drug is safe and innocuous, and that makes you no better than Joe Camel, the Budweiser frogs or Doonesbury’s own Mr. Butts.

Ed Gogek is a psychiatrist in Prescott, Arizona. Jim Gogek, an editorial writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow in reducing substance abuse.