Unfortunately, the structure of certain atoms makes nuclear weapons possible. Any list of other regrettable aspects of reality should include this: Certain molecules derived from plants interact in addictive ways with the human nervous system. So, Americans must continue rethinking policies regarding marijuana.
Justice Louis Brandeis’s dictum that federalism enables each American state to be a “laboratory” of democracy is especially apt today. Many states have become laboratories in often haphazard social experiments regarding marijuana. Accumulating evidence is forcing some facile beliefs to evolve.
The Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman reports that 74 percent of Americans live in states that permit access to recreational and/or medical marijuana. And “more Americans consume marijuana every day than smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol every day.”
Legalization, Lehman says, has meant drugs of reliable quality and increasing strength are conveniently available in stores that customers visit without risking stigma. Cigarettes’ nicotine contents do not vary widely. But regular marijuana users, who drive commercial sales, demand ever-more-potent products.
Only two states cap permissible levels of THC (marijuana’s intoxicating component). Jonathan P. Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University, in a report on “alternatives to prohibitions,” says: “The THC content of seized marijuana never exceeded 5% before 2000; but soon after legalization” the labeled potency of some products sold in state-licensed stores “routinely exceeded 20%,” and other products are now supplemented by “extract-based products with THC content of 60% or even 90%.”
Decriminalization of marijuana for customers, and/or legalization of suppliers, has produced a novel American moment. Two years ago, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist told the New York Times: There is no U.S. precedent for a drug — a rapidly evolving one — concerning which doctors have said, “Go experiment and tell me what happens.”
Marijuana has swiftly joined society’s long-standing menu of familiar recreational drugs. A majority of American adults use, at least occasionally, a consumer good that is a sometimes addictive psychoactive drug: alcohol. This exercise of a private right that has been widely enjoyed for millennia is too embedded in most societies to extirpate, or even diminish, other than by cautionary health information.
In 2024, after six decades of intense public health warnings, 9.9 percent of adults (25.2 million) were still ingesting nicotine from cigarettes, which are almost universally known to be harmful when used as intended. Cigarettes and alcohol, and their social costs, are well-known. Marijuana’s are not.
The New York Times in 2024 reported on harms done to constant marijuana users who assume the drug is nonaddictive and safe. Delusions, paranoia and other symptoms of psychosis, and severe vomiting, are among the potential effects of marijuana use disorder for a third of near-daily users, or about 6 million people, according to the Times. Especially susceptible are the estimated 8.4 million 18- to 25-year-olds, with still-developing brains, who use marijuana regularly.
The versatile economist Tyler Cowen, the intelligentsia’s equivalent of a utility infielder, writes for the Free Press, “‘Pot psychosis’ is a common phenomenon, and an increasing body of evidence ties marijuana consumption to motor-vehicle crashes and poor workplace performance.” In humanity’s present and future, “reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well.” So, heavy marijuana use will be another of society’s sorting variables, limiting the flourishing of imprudent users.
Cowen says paternalistic government that tries to protect people from themselves “is far less workable than in times past” because government has less credibility, less control over information and less control over our lives. Nevertheless, doubts about marijuana’s harmlessness are multiplying.
In 2024, voters in Florida and both Dakotas rejected legalization initiatives. This November, in Massachusetts, which legalized recreational marijuana in 2016, voters might end its legal sale. This initiative probably will fail, but it and interest in repeal elsewhere indicate that the permissive consensus is fraying as accumulating evidence provokes second thoughts.
As the eminent scholar of drug policy Mark Kleiman once said: Society can choose to have the problems of drug legalization or those of prohibition. But given those troublesome plant-derived molecules, society cannot choose not to have problems.
The nation, and certain states, have chosen to have the problems accompanying varying degrees of permissiveness. Society, however, is not as tidy and controllable as an actual laboratory, where disappointing experiments can be easily scrapped.
Drug policies will continue to evolve, generating evidence. Already, however, it is clear that various marijuana policies in different U.S. jurisdictions produce substantial collateral damages. All this illustrates a Brandeis warning: “There are no shortcuts in evolution.”
The post Rethinking the haphazard marijuana social experiment appeared first on Washington Post.
