Pot Legalization Threatens Public Health: Drug Policy Expert

Photo by Cannabis Culture via Flickr

The House was scheduled to vote Friday on a bill that would legalize marijuana nationally. If passed, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act  (MORE) authored by Rep. Jerry Nadler and supported by the nation’s largest tobacco and alcohol companies, would represent a historic victory for an industry that has spent millions to lobby for its passage.

And if passed as currently written, without any public health guardrails, it will also represent a historic victory for those same big tobacco companies that view marijuana as a golden opportunity at a second life.

To be clear, removing criminal penalties for the low-level possession of marijuana is the right thing to do. Sending people to jail for possessing a joint is not the right approach to treating misuse and addiction.

But full legalization is entirely different.

Legalization opens the door to the mass normalization and commercialization of a product that does, in fact, present greater public health risks than its proponents would want the public to believe.

A lot has changed since Baby Boomers tried marijuana in college. Today’s weed has been supercharged by the industry to have a THC potency of up to 99 percent, compared to a mere 3 percent when they tried it.

Marijuana products today don’t represent a 1970s dorm room social, but rather flavorful edibles, meant to appeal to children. And ultra-high potency concentrates meant to turn casual users into people with a marijuana use disorder.

 In fact, research finds one in every three past-year users met the clinical criteria for a marijuana use disorder.

Much more scientific research is needed to understand fully the health risks of high-potency marijuana, but what we do know so far is unsettling, and should be enough to dissuade the House Democrats and Republicans alike from passing this bill.

According to a recent study in the UK, daily users of high-potency marijuana had four times the odds of developing psychosis and schizophrenia compared with those who had never used marijuana.

And that study is not an outlier—others have found that marijuana involved in “approximately 50 percent of psychosis and schizophrenia cases.”

While the percentage of marijuana users who experience these conditions and other mental health disorders may be in the minority, we have no way of knowing in advance who is susceptible to these outcomes.

That is why both Republican and Democratic-appointed Surgeons General warn against marijuana use and admit that legalization policies represent something inconsistent with where the science is.

The Hazards of Potent Pot

To understand how these and other public health risks would play out under legalization, one need only look as far as the states that have already legalized marijuana. In Colorado, the percentage of traffic fatalities in which drivers tested positive for THC increased over 75 percent since legalization.

Marijuana use among people ages 18-25 is 14 percent higher in Colorado than the national average, and cases of addiction in people over 18 is 3.2 percent higher. In all states in which marijuana has been legalized, there has been a 25 percent increase in marijuana use disorder (CUD) among 12–17-year-olds.

Such trends have galvanized parents across the country to form advocacy groups for those impacted–sometimes tragically–by marijuana-related health issues.

Among them are Laura and John Stack, whose son Johnny battled with psychosis and schizophrenia as a result of using marijuana, which he started after it was legalized in Colorado. He ultimately died by suicide. His parents formed an organization, Johnny’s Ambassadors, to raise awareness about the overlooked harms of marijuana use.

There’s also Sally Schindel, whose son wrote on his suicide note that “marijuana killed my soul” and took his life after battling with marijuana addiction.

In the past several years, big tobacco companies like Altria have invested billions of dollars in the burgeoning cannabis industry with the expectation that marijuana be next to the cash register at every bodega.

Congress must refuse to allow corporate interests to shape public policy on the sale of a product that has such a potential for harm. It should instead listen to the science and the concerned families of those whose lives have been ruined from using a product without knowing the dangers.

Thankfully, President Joe Biden has joined the scientific chorus and continues to reject marijuana legalization, as represented both in his rhetoric and in his latest budget request, which prohibits Washington, DC, from legalizing marijuana sales and continues to allow Justice Department resources to be used to fight marijuana trafficking.

And while that means legislation like the MORE Act is likely dead on arrival, we know special interest groups like Big Tobacco won’t back down.

Will we let them fool us again?

Kevin A. Sabet, Ph.D., is a former Obama Administration drug policy advisor. He is currently the President and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM)), a non-profit organization he founded with Cong. Patrick Kennedy and David Frum.He is the author is and author of Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.