A couple of months
ago, arguing in favor of marijuana prohibition at the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC), radio producer Christopher
Beach faced a
mostly hostile audience. “There used to be a strong conservative
coalition opposed to drugs, but it’s dissipated in the face of
mounting public support for legalization,” Beach told The
Atlantic‘s Molly Ball afterward. “We’re fighting against the
tide on this.” According to the headline of an
essay by Beach and his boss, former drug czar Bill Bennett, in
the May 5 issue of The Weekly Standard, they are also
fighting “The Legalization Juggernaut,” which presumably is moving
with the tide. Beach and Bennett nevertheless argue that it’s not
too late to turn this juggernaut around. Maybe so, but they are
going to need a bigger boat, or at least better arguments. Here are
a few they should consider retiring:
The great political scientist James Q. Wilson staunchly
opposed the legalization of drugs. He explained that “drug use is
wrong because it is immoral and it is immoral because it enslaves
the mind and destroys the soul.” No society should want unhealthy
substances destroying the minds, bodies, character, and potential
of its citizens.
As I note in my book
Saying Yes, Wilson’s explanation made no distinction
between use and abuse, weirdly implying that consumption of
psychoactive substances always (or at least usually) “enslaves the
mind and destroys the soul,” which was his tendentious description
of addiction. Furthermore, Wilson conceded that alcohol poses the
same sort of threat, which raises the obvious question of how it
can be just to treat suppliers of beer, wine, and liquor as
legitimate businessmen while treating suppliers of marijuana,
cocaine, and heroin as criminals.
No country in the history of the world has persevered in
the legalization of drugs. None. We may learn the hard way
why.
You can’t persevere in a policy you’ve never tried, and to date
no country has legalized the drugs currently banned by the U.S.
government, although Uruguay is moving toward legalization of
marijuana. Then again, marijuana prohibition is a relatively recent
development, dating to 1937 at the national level in the United
States, and all of the currently proscribed drugs were legal for
almost all of human history, which many people might consider a
precedent of some significance.
Even in states that have allowed only medicinal
marijuana, use among young people has risen.
If Beach and Bennett mean that cannabis consumption by teenagers
has increased more in states with medical marijuana laws than in
other states, they are wrong, according to a March 2012
study in Annals of Epidemiology, an October 2013
analysis in the Journal of Policy Analysis and
Management, and an April 2014 study
in the Journal of Adolescent Health. “This study did not
find increases in adolescent marijuana use related to legalization
of medical marijuana,” say the authors of the most recent study,
which was published online a couple of weeks ago.
Marijuana today is far more potent than it was in the
1960s and ’70s….The more potent the drug the more dangerous its
effects.
Not if you are concerned about the respiratory health effects of
smoking, which is probably the most serious physical hazard posed
by pot. The stronger the pot, the less you smoke to achieve the
desired effect.
Even casual pot smoking has been linked to harmful brain
abnormalities. An important new study by researchers at
Northwestern University to be published in the Journal of
Neuroscience found that young adults who smoked pot only
once or twice a week still showed significant abnormalities in the
part of the brain that deals with memory and
motivation.
The study to which Beach and Bennett refer
did not actually show that the “brain abnormalities” were
harmful, or even that they were caused by marijuana.
Marijuana, of course, is a gateway drug. Even the
authors of Marijuana Legalization admit that
“kids who use marijuana—particularly those who start marijuana use
at a young age—are statistically much more likely to go on to use
other drugs than their peers who do not use
marijuana.”
The authors of
that book (Jonathan Caulkins, Angela Hawken, Beau Kilmer, and
Mark Kleiman) go on to say, “What is not at all clear, however, is
whether marijuana use causes subsequent use of
other drugs or whether it is merely
a signal indicating the presence of underlying
social, psychological, or physiological risk factors—such as weak
parental supervision, a taste for intoxication, or a willingness to
take risks—for both early marijuana use and later hard drug
use.”
Over the last 10 years, fatal car accidents involving
people who were stoned have tripled, according to a report in
the American Journal of
Epidemiology.
What the study
actually found, based on data from six states, was that the
share of drivers killed in car crashes who tested positive for
cannabinol, a marijuana metabolite, rose from from 4.2 percent
in 1999 to 12.2 percent in 2010. Cannabinol is not psychoactive and
can be detected up to a week after marijuana consumption, so its
presence does not indicate a driver was stoned at the time of the
crash, let alone that marijuana contributed to it. During the same
period, the total number of traffic fatalities declined. There is
reason to believe legalizing marijuana could
accelerate that downward trend, assuming that more pot smoking
is accompanied by less drinking.
On the subject of marijuana, Beach and Bennett note, “The
shift in public opinion has been dramatic.” They cite recent
polling data indicating majority support for legalization but say
“we are convinced this headlong rush into disaster can be
stopped—if, that is, political leaders can be found who have the
nerve to take on the conventional wisdom.” It is gratifying
that pot prohibitionists feel compelled to portray themselves as
underdogs, since most Americans disagree with them. But it seems
they have not fully digested the implications of their new minority
status, which means the same old moralistic assertions and
scientific misrepresentations will no longer do. Drug warriors will
have to
step up their game now that they are in the unaccustomed
position of needing to persuade people.
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
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