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Toke of the Town

You may have heard the sarcastic saying that “95% of statistics are made up on the spot”. It is beginning to look like that may be the case for the decades-old study on addiction rates by the National Institute on Drug Abuse(NIDA) that both pro- and anti-cannabis supporters cite when they say that roughly 9% of marijuana users will become addicted.
The same NIDA study, released in a trade journal named Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology in 1994, actually places pot near the bottom of the list, if that 9-10% figure is to be believed. Marijuana advocates can point to the study and show that addiction rates, according to the study, are much higher in substances like heroin (23-25%), cocaine (15-20%), or even tobacco (20-30%) and alcohol (15%), but progressive thinkers on the topic feel that even 9% is way off on weed, and that the number is truly much lower.