That pot is not as dangerous as other drugs does not make the case for its widespread and highly commercialized public use.
That pot is not as dangerous as other drugs does not make the case for its widespread and highly commercialized public use.
‘C ity air makes you free.” Or so it was held among German serfs in the Middle Ages. If they could escape to a city and live there for a year and a day, they were liberated from their masters.
Today, the most salient characteristic of the air in many cities is the smell of marijuana. A strong odor of weed often greets the visitor by train to New York City as soon as he opens the door out of Moynihan Train Hall. Even smaller cities are not immune to pot’s externalities. In my native Cincinnati, which is still navigating the legalization of recreational marijuana that Ohio voters approved last fall, downtown residents and business owners are uneasy about the possibility of drug dispensaries opening near them.
That marijuana’s omnipresence is a nationwide reality is proof of the success of recreational-marijuana legalization in the U.S. That some have a lingering discomfort with this omnipresence is a sign that this “success” is not something we should celebrate.
That’s not to say weed isn’t popular. In 2012, when Washington and Colorado became the first states to permit recreational-marijuana use, a little less than half of the country supported legalization, according to Gallup. As of 2023, it was up to 70 percent. Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C. (a majority of the U.S. population), have now followed the lead of former outliers Washington and Colorado. One study found that the number of daily marijuana users has exceeded the number of daily consumers of alcohol.
But it is unwise to entrust momentary majorities with determining what is right. For decades, legalization advocates have derided skeptics as alarmists, paranoid purveyors of warnings about “reefer madness.” In response, they have invoked marijuana’s potential uses for cancer patients and others and otherwise downplayed potential risks. But there is emerging scientific evidence of the dangers of marijuana, especially for young people, and in its modern, more potent form.
New studies suggest that it’s hardly alarmist to worry about the risks of marijuana-induced psychosis and schizophrenia, increased anxiety and decreased motivation, elevated risk of heart attack and stroke, and substance abuse. Marijuana usage is also becoming increasingly linked to car accidents, particularly in recreational-use states. Further research is likely to yield even more distressing findings. But that research may not keep pace with the expansion of the drug’s use. That makes millions nationwide unintentional guinea pigs.
The actual experience of legalization has, moreover, not brought all its promised benefits. After legalization, illegal-weed purveyors have proliferated in New York. Colorado’s black market has grown, as has marijuana-related psychosis.
Evidence such as this may persuade those — including myself — who were formerly undecided on or even passively in favor of recreational-marijuana legalization. But for now, it seems to avail little against the appealing logic of advocates, who continue to minimize the drug’s negative effects, to emphasize the unnecessary costs of enforcing full bans (a plausible argument when one considers previous numbers of marijuana-possession arrests), and to invoke the fundamentally American principle of individual freedom. Against all this, as well as the rising tide of popular sentiment and use, skepticism can seem futile.
It is not. There remain many valid tools at the very least to keep marijuana (and its smell) from taking over public life. The U.S. government may effectively be giving up on its phantom illegalization. But not all places in the U.S. have abandoned outright restriction of recreational use. Last year, Oklahoma voters rejected recreational marijuana. Voters in Arkansas and both North and South Dakota did the same in 2022.
Even in places where recreational use is legal, governments can and should play some role in determining where and how it is consumed. The Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman has made the case for a regime of “legal permission combined with stiff restrictions designed to mitigate the social and individual harms of use.” In National Review, Rachel Lu advocated “prudent responses” that combine “education, rehabilitation, and targeted forms of regulation.” Those who are worried that we are engaging in a dangerous real-time experiment on ourselves, whose injurious results we will have to find out the hard way, are not without recourse.
But what about freedom? Doesn’t it violate personal freedom to impose any restrictions, even more mild ones, on the individual’s ability to use marijuana? A superficial understanding of the idea might suggest so. But a deeper understanding of freedom would be wary of any substance that, in fact, makes one less free, not more, as Lehman argued on a recent episode of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast. It is the unique — and uniquely insidious — power of drugs to make themselves masters, and their users serfs. That marijuana might not be as dangerous, in this respect or others, as other drugs does not make the case for its widespread and highly commercialized public use.