Editor’s Note: TAI will be hosting a debate about the drug war July 25th.
For many years now, public policy analysts have been carefully studying the tradeoffs involved in decriminalizing some combination of the smoking, selling, and growing of marijuana. In the serious analyses the main factors in argumentative play have remained fairly constant until recently.
To simplify somewhat, on the side of decriminalization-if-not-legalization, there has stood the huge mess made of our justice and penal systems occasioned by categorizing marijuana use as a felony. That mess has included the thoroughly disgraceful, wildly uneven application of penalties between white middle class and black underclass violators, a problem that elides into a much older and even more damaging mess with which we also still struggle. The often gang-encrusted and violent criminal activity associated with the growing, importation, and the sale of marijuana (and other banned drugs, of course) has played out in ways that have turned entire urban neighborhoods, their public schools included, into virtual war zones. Black markets really are bad, and criminalizing marijuana has helped create massive, multi-layered ones.
And there has also stood the argument that marijuana use is no worse—and arguably less bad—for human health than alcohol use, so why the double standard?
On the side opposing change in the legal status quo have stood arguments that marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of more dangerous and addictive substances, and that legalization would lead many to indulge who might not otherwise do so—the predicate here being that all drug use is undesirable from the perspective of the common weal. Whether what is undesirable—and who gets to decide what is undesirable—should also ipso factobe unlawful are other issues of a legal-philosophical nature, but not trivial or irrelevant issues.
A related legal-philosophical issue, this time in the form of the slippery slope: legalize marijuana, then why not legalize LSD, cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin while we’re at it?1 Where and how do we draw the line between libertarian permissiveness and common sense?
It is fair to say that virtually no one who has studied the problem objectively over the years liked the status quo, but concluded that the risks of changing it in one way or others could neither be precisely measured nor glibly pushed away. The values involved were incommensurate, after all: How was it possible to measure the extant cost of criminal and legal dysfunction of a ban against the potential human health risks of repealing or relaxing the ban?
The resultant uncertainty produced political gridlock on the issue, doubtless reinforced by partisan gridlock on many other issues. And from what the polls tell us, public opinion until recently has been about as uncertain as expert opinion, so calculating politicians saw nothing much to gain by advocating a significant deviation from the status quo. In short, we have been more or less stuck for decades at the legal level, with the depredations of the status quo inflicting more pain and damage over time.
Four things have changed this picture in recent years, some of them longer in gestation than others.
First, several states have legalized aspects of marijuana use, increasing steadily with the passage of time, putting themselves in opposition to Federal law—which did not change in essence from 1937 until last year.2 That has been awkward, and made manifest the problem in the political arena.
Second, major strides have been made in the study of medicinal uses of the key chemicals in cannabis. Research has been ongoing for a long time (on LSD, too, to a lesser and narrower extent), but it has really only been in the past year or so that the putative health benefits of marijuana have entered broad public consciousness.
And third, partly as a result of the first two changes, public attitudes have shifted significantly, making reform an appealing political stance on the Federal level really for the first time. Already at least one Democrat running for President, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, proposes that Federal law following suit to match the states that have legalized marijuana. Politicians don’t make proposals like that unless they think a strong majority of their kind of voters will approve.
Indeed, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock can sense the momentum for legalization in virtually all forms and at all levels of government. And that sense is a familiar one, reminiscent of several other shifts in the American cultural Overton Window from the fairly recent past.
One such shift in public opinion with specific legal consequences, dating from about half a century ago, concerned both divorce and abortion, which was of a piece with a broader shift in attitudes concerning women’s rights and equality. More recently we have seen a shift in attitudes and legal consequences about so-called marriage equality, which is of a piece with a broader shift in attitudes about homosexuality. Both of these changes were launched out of the counterculture and eventually became mainstream views as the nation’s demographic pyramid leaned into the future. For those old enough to remember, the sense of inevitability about both gradually but unmistakably grew before our eyes.
More liberal policy sentiments concerning marijuana were bound to follow eventually from the same source, and be carried along, as with the others, by an avalanche of popular culture goads. In this case those goads have included Cheech & Chong ad nauseum, the role of “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, the popular television series Weeds, and most of us could compile a list of other examples printed in 28-point font that could easily reach the moon and return without exhausting the supply of pot-normalizing mass entertainment fare.
But I said four things have changed recently. Beyond the precedents set by vanguard states, the medical use appeal, and the breeching of the threshold of a more or less evenly divided public opinion, what other new wheel is in spin?
It’s the money, man.
April a year ago, Jim Hagedorn, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board at Scotts Miracle Gro, told a small group assembled that he was investing heavily in hydroponic equipment to meet the burgeoning demand of weed-growers. He confirmed that measured by dollar-for-dollar return on investment, his company was going to make way more money out of that then it was selling plant fertilizer and weed-killer. Hagedorn subsequently offered to buy Sunlight Supply to add it to the part of Miracle Grow focused on the cannabis trade—Hawthorn Gardening—run by Jim’s son Chris.
Hagedorn’s enthusiasm for supplying pot growers with the tools of the trade surprised me at the time. That’s not what I expected to hear from a former USAF fighter jet pilot. But I soon began noticing all kinds of internet ads trying to entice investment in cannabis-related companies of one kind or another—usually the sort of stuff trolling after some news item or feature, mixed in with the miracle cures and celebrity fluff. I began to see more and more of them over the past fourteen months because, I think, there have actually been more and more of them.
In tandem with corporate money machines of various types and shapes getting into gear, the media has recently been leaping onto the weed wagon. At O’Hare Airport in Chicago a few weeks ago, stopped over briefly on my way to Denver, I beheld a sudden proliferation of magazine copy hailing the advent of legalized marijuana. I first noticed Willie Nelson smiling out in a cloud of smoke from the cover of Rolling Stone, telling everybody how marijuana had saved his life. Then I noticed a magazine I’d never seen before in a Hudson’s called Cannabis. Its cover looked to illustrate a swirling drop of about-to-be-ignited hash oil at the end of a pipette (please don’t ask me how I know that). And then I saw the cover of Time magazine devoted to the case for medical marijuana.
Taken together, sandwiched in between Foreign Affairs and the Atlantic and the gossip and muscle-building and hot-rod car magazines, I knew what it meant: This was normalization with a vengeance, the profit motive in the lead. I wondered whether some corporate conglomerates and investment firms now quietly staking out an interest—call it hedging if you like—in cannabis companies might also have downstream financial interests in some of these slick magazines.
So what’s it all mean? The first thing it means is that all the serious, careful study that has been done over the years about the cons as well as the pros of marijuana legalization now amounts for all practical purposes to a hill of cow flop. When there are tens or even hundreds of million dollars to be made, pretty much nobody gives a damn about objective research and dispassionate consideration of likely tradeoffs and downsides.
We can see that basic impulse already at work in some of the states that have legalized marijuana for recreational and/or medical purposes. One of the first things typical state legislators tell you is how much revenue it’s added to state coffers. They love it, and they’re not shy about saying it.
Colorado is one such state, of course. Do many folks in the statehouse care that one of the consequences of Colorado’s legalized recreational marijuana is that downtown Boulder is now crowded with aggressively rude panhandlers, often working in teams, high as kites and present-oriented to the max? If they do they don’t talk about it.
Do many legislators care that medical marijuana is wildly abused in many states? It’s so easy, in California, say, to get supposedly medical access to weed that it’s hardly unknown for folks to walk out of the dispensary and turn around and sell the stuff to 16-year-old kids on the street for a healthy profit. They don’t seem to care, as long as the state can tax the deuce out of at least the first in the sequence of sales.
To me, this puts legalized marijuana, medical or otherwise, on a similar ethical plain with state lotteries and other forms of state-sanctioned gambling. I don’t think it’s any state’s business, or the business of the Federal government, to interfere with games of chance played in private among consenting adults. But that’s a far cry from the state essentially blessing an activity that everyone knows preys on those citizens who can least afford it: poor people and especially those addicted to gambling. State endorsement of such behavior is morally wrong in a democratic environment, and I don’t care if the money taken in is used to support the schools, or the elderly, or whatever. If those needs are important enough, let the politicians go to the public and ask that they be supported through the normal routines of taxation.
Recreational or medical marijuana comes with the same problem, only worse.
I don’t doubt that there are legitimate medical uses of marijuana. I don’t doubt that recreational use of marijuana is no different, and is perhaps less harmful, than recreational use of whiskey and rum. I don’t have a problem with the principle of a sin tax either. I do have a problem with government at one level or another appearing to sanction, endorse, and essentially bless behavior that it knows is harmful to many people.
Here’s the real rub: When the specific-source tax revenues become so important to a government, it’s all too easy for merely sanctioning a behavior to bleed over into promoting it. How to recognize that bleed? When states allow others or themselves to undertake advertising expenses to sell the stuff. Thus does a government addicted to sucking revenue by any means necessary offload other forms of addiction onto others in the process.
What others? I’m not concerned with the casual or social smoker anymore than I am about the casual or social drinker. I’m talking about the roughly 8-12% of the adult population—probably a conservative estimate—who can’t reliably handle intoxicating substances. There is such a thing as an addictive personality, and that’s why even beer, let alone marijuana, can be and often is a gateway drug. We can rephrase F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about alcohol and have it be just as true for weed: First you take a toke, then the toke takes a toke, then the toke takes you.
We do have in place a poor system for dealing with alcoholism, because the problem has been with us for generations. We have almost no effective system in place for dealing with people who become addicted to weed, and the clinics we do have tend to be mandated in effect by the criminal justice system. Anyone who tells you that marijuana isn’t and can never be “physically addictive” just doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. That’s amateur chemistry mixing with ignorance about human psychology to produce wishful thinking of a decidedly absurd sort.
And to boot, for those aging hippies who don’t yet know, the weed commonly being smoked in recent years—even when unlaced with additives—is not remotely like the gentle, lifting stuff you smoked in college 40-50 years ago. No more light buzz from half a dozen people passing four or five joints around in the course of a few hours while listening to music. It’s more like kick your ass in a hallucinogenic hole after four or five puffs.
The ban on marijuana, where it still exists, does deter many people, especially young still personality-forming people, from trying the drug. Lift the ban and many who never would have indulged will do so, and some non-trivial percentage of them will before long find their lives a wreck as a result. As with alcoholism, whole families are inevitably sucked into these kinds of problems. Count yourself lucky if you’ve never experienced anything like that close at hand.
I know which way the big waves of money are flowing now. I look forward to all the problems legalization will or might solve and, as plainly noted above, they are hardly minor. But I don’t look forward to all the problems it will create with no backstop for dealing with them.
So if I were sitting in some legislature, in some state capital or in Washington, I would condition my vote for any relaxation of current laws on there being full provision in any reform bill for the adequate medical and mental health care of those who get thrown beneath the axles of the onrushing legal shift in process. To do any less would be both heartless and irresponsible.
Why do I worry that what is coming down the road bears no mere light load of heartlessness and irresponsibility? That we are about to trade one clutch of problems for another? Because I’ve been around the block some, and the experience has, as Van Morrison once put it, “stoned me to my soul.”
1I may be biased, but to me the best older essays on this subject are Mark A.R. Kleiman, “Dopey, Boozy, Smoky—and Stupid,” The American Interest, II:3 (Winter 2007), and Angela Hawken, Beau Kilmer, Jonathan P. Caulkins, & Mark A.R. Kleiman,“A Voter’s Guide to Legalizing Marijuana,” The American Interest, VIII:2 (Holidays 2012).
2Oregon decriminalized marijuana use in 1973, and California became the first state to legalize medical cannabis in 1996. In 2012, Colorado and Washington legalized cannabis for recreational use. The majority of states have since followed these leads. Meanwhile, the 2018 farm bill legalized low-THC hemp nationwide and thus essentially removes hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD) from the Controlled Substances Act. That marks a significant precedent.