On Monday night Megan Johnson, health promotion club, introduced Dr. Christian Thurstone to a packed Sun Room in the Memorial Union. With a round of applause and some hoots and hollers Thurstone took the stage.

“I don’t think we should have medical marijuana,” said Thurstone, addiction and adolescent psychiatrist. “We should have put our resources into getting the [Investigational New Drug] exemption and going that route. I think the best we can hope for now if going back to a care giver model and rejecting legalizing it outright.”

His presentation slide show, titled “A plea for reefer sanity” discussed statistics and changes in youth behavior Thurstone has noticed while providing addiction and adolescent psychiatry services in Denver.

“A lot of the problem in the discussion of the drug control policy … is this all or nothing thinking,” Thurstone said. “It doesn’t need to be this way. There is a third way — the science based way.”

Thurstone quoted the National Survey of Drug Use and Health saying 60 percent of new users of marijuana every year are younger than 18. He also pointed out 17 percent of those new users go on to become addicts.

“Would I say that the demographic of having college students in Denver [and] Boulder helps drive how much marijuana and marijuana dispensaries there are? I would say absolutely,” Thurstone said. “If I were a business man, I would absolutely have my medical marijuana dispensary near high schools, community colleges, universities. 60 percent of new users are under the age of 18. If you move that up to early 20s, almost all new users are in their early 20s or less.”

Thurstone briefly began to describe the medical marijuana law in Colorado.

“A physician makes a recommendation for marijuana and then that form is submitted to the state and you get a ‘red card’ where you can buy marijuana, grow marijuana or have someone grow it for you,” Thurstone said.

Thurstone noted that he believes the earlier care giver model that was originally in place was more effective in his opinion.

“If you rely on the first eight years of our medical marijuana law in Colorado, we had a care giver model,” Thurstone said. “You had to grow it yourself or you could designate a care giver to grow six plants for you. No commercial distribution of marijuana. The Iowa proposals would have the dispensaries model.”

Another alternative Thurstone mentioned is Sativex. Sativex is a drug that is currently available in Canada and parts of Europe that contains some of the active ingredients in marijuana but can be controlled more easily because it is not smoked, but sprayed up the nose.

“It’s an oral spray of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the ingredients in marijuana, and cannabinol, another ingredient in marijuana, that makes the marijuana less addictive, less harsh than straight pure THC,” Thurstone said. “I think we should push for that to be available on an exception basis before it has its final FDA approval … That gives states a medicine that they can use and protects kids and public safety.”

Hearing about Sativex also piqued the interest of some attendees at the lecture.

“Something I was very excited to hear about was a mouth spray containing THC and cannabinoids which could potentially be utilized as a low-risk alternative to smoked marijuana,”  said Kaci McCleary, senior in psychology. “The introduction of such a product could really change the whole conversation.”

After reflecting on the Colorado law regarding medical marijuana, Thurstone had some suggestions for what Iowa should look for if they propose a similar law.

“I would recommend waiting until Sativex becomes widely available, until the science catches up with us,” Thurstone said. “That’s where I would put my energy because I think that would protect public safety, protect kids, and also give people benefit that would use it compassionately.”

With all the differing opinions on the subject, being informed on the issues at hand is always useful.

“I think college students are our future so it’s important for them to be up on these policies and what’s happening,” Thurstone said. “It’s been shown that college students are much more likely to support outright legalization than older age groups and so I think it’s important to have more communication, dialogue and information around this.”

The lecture gave students a chance to discover topics that they would like to dig into more on their own.

“In a class last year I was taught that marijuana was not addictive, yet the speaker said that there was an academic consensus that it was,” McCleary said. “This contradiction is something I want to look into more, and it really confirms my belief that we need to find some way to get reliable information in order to make informed decisions about public policy.”