The movement to legalize marijuana has enjoyed an unbroken string of victories on the state level over the last decade. But as Congress considers nationwide legalization, proponents of legal cannabis are making the same empty promises they made to the residents of every state that took their advice.
They spoke of marijuana as a harmless drug that gave a cheap high and nothing more — not at all like the deadlier hard drugs such as meth and opioids, with their unhealthy and even lethal consequences. They also downplayed the idea that widespread drug use would bring about societal maladies.
As of this spring, science and data had borne out the fact that marijuana is actually pretty dangerous for a number of reasons. Based on data obtained since legalization, both medical and recreational marijuana use are associated with a 23% increase in mortality rates from opioid use — an increase that disproportionately affects men and nonwhites. It turns out there might indeed be something to that old saying about cannabis as a “gateway drug.” People have sneered and laughed at this idea for decades, and science shows they were wrong to do so. There is a great deal about drug dependency that science still does not fully understand.
And death is not the only potentially deleterious health consequence. The smoking of cannabis causes lung and heart maladies and testicular cancer, something slick marketing of legalization has left many users unaware of. But even more alarmingly, habitual use of marijuana in one’s teens or early 20s can cause permanent brain damage, affecting a late-forming part of the brain (the frontal cortex) that is critical to “planning, judgment, decision-making, and personality.”
So what happens to young people thus affected, who were convinced by advocates that they were just having harmless fun? Do they become burdens on society? Do they join, or do they already account for, the growing armies of homeless who suffer from addiction and psychosis? Are they already camping out on the streets of so many West Coast cities and making them uninhabitable? Do they resort to criminality and violence? It may be some decades before the data exist to tell the whole story, but the field of psychiatry has already produced substantial evidence, in a peer-reviewed environment and based on more than 10,000 subjects, that marijuana use correlates with physical violence in youths. Perhaps it was not an accident that the school shooter in Uvalde was a known pothead.
Legalization is also affecting public safety in ways unrelated to crime, ill health, and drug deaths. Colorado, which legalized marijuana in 2013, has produced enough data to demonstrate as much. According to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice, the number of annual poison control calls related to marijuana increased sevenfold after legalization. The incidence of impaired drivers who are high from cannabis quadrupled after legalization. The Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program found a doubling of marijuana-related car accidents and a 30% increase in Colorado traffic deaths since 2013.
Marijuana, again, is not harmless. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. It may make sense to decriminalize the drug for small amounts of personal use, but Congress would err to give rise to an industry so potentially harmful to the public.
Weed has become big business since legalization began. Those profiting from it will be very loath to give up such a stream of revenue, regardless of the broader consequences to society. Every day, activists are pushing for new states to join the club and legalize. If the national government throws caution to the wind and legalizes the trade nationally, it will not fix any existing problem facing the nation. It may well exacerbate those problems in ways no one has even anticipated.
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Tags: Marijuana legalization, Editorials, Washington D.C., Colorado, Marijuana
Original Author: Washington Examiner
Original Location: Congress should not legalize marijuana
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