Legalizing marijuana is harmful. Courtesy | Flickr
One of the idiocies of modern policy is the belief that legalizing a certain crime will eliminate that crime. The legalization of recreational marijuana is one of these social experiments that has utterly failed and needs to cease.
Contrary to the popular belief that marijuana acts as a harmless relaxant that produces a “mellow” high, the recreational marijuana products sold today contain much larger amounts of the hallucinogenic chemical THC than in the past, boosting the strength, addictiveness, and hazardous effects of the drug. According to reports from the Drug Abuse Warning Network, the American Chemical Society, the Journal of Neuroscience, and many others, cannabis has caused depression, anxiety, psychosis, schizophrenia, cognitive impairment, memory loss, severe lung damage, risky and suicidal behaviors, heart attacks and strokes, and even cancer.
But with easily accessible marijuana supported by strong public advertising—as seen in Ann Arbor billboards touting “Happiness: Next Exit,” “Don’t leave without saying high,” or “Let’s go to your place, we’ll bring the weed”—people who otherwise would have stayed away from the substance are actively encouraged to try it.
A 2021 panel study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that “marijuana use among young adults reached the highest level ever recorded” since data became available in 1988, with the most significant jump occurring within the past 10 years.
There is growing evidence that using marijuana neurologically predisposes the user to opioids and other drug abuse–in other words, that marijuana is a “gateway drug.”
A study conducted by the Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences tracked cannabis users for over 25 years, and found that out of the 1,265 participants, “Regular or heavy cannabis use was associated with an increased risk of using other illicit drugs, abusing or becoming dependent upon other illicit drugs, and using a wider variety of other illicit drugs.”
Supporters of cannabis legalization argued that it would crowd out the black market, thus making the product “safer” and restricting access to minors. Instead of causing the marijuana black market to go out of business however, legalizing recreational marijuana has in fact caused the black market to grow.
This is because government regulations and taxes on the production and sale of legal marijuana jack up the prices for a product that customers can buy cheaper at illegal dispensaries. And in a marijuana-tolerant environment, the risk of arrest and imprisonment for this offense is much lower.
Chris Hawkins, commander of the Michigan State Police, stated in 2021 that “Many operators we take enforcement action on go right back to their illegal activities because of the leniencies of penalties.” He also said he has seen an increase in illegal activity—including the sale of the drug to minors—since a state ballot initiative legalized recreational marijuana use in Michigan in 2018.
Currently, 21 states have legalized recreational marijuana.
The Wall Street Journal recently covered this growing problem in Oklahoma and California, where many marijuana producers don’t even bother to register legally or comply with regulatory standards because it’s difficult for police to immediately know whether a weed farm is licensed.
The worst part about this exploding black market is that more young people (who have been told that weed is “safe” and “natural”) have access to this drug. Unsurprisingly, there has been a massive increase in marijuana use and poisoning in adolescents, causing chronic vomiting, psychosis, hospitalization, and sometimes death.
The National Poison Data System found a 245% increase in pediatric misuse of cannabis from 2000 to 2020, with the largest increase occurring from 2017 to 2020, when marijuana legalization took off nationally.
As a last resort, cannabis advocates will often point to the lack of concrete evidence that marijuana legalization leads to an increase in violent crimes, and should therefore be considered safe.
This claim is extremely questionable. Since crime rate fluctuations rely on a number of different factors, it is incredibly difficult to determine how much cannabis legalization has directly influenced crime rates. On top of this, states have an interest in the economic revenue that the cannabis industry makes and would rather turn a blind eye to the negative effects.
But in reality, compelling evidence exists linking cannabis to crime-causing tendencies.
An Australian study published by the National Library of Medicine in 2010 observed that “Serious aggression is associated with regular cannabis use and also reduced behavioral inhibition.”
The results of a 2017 Canadian study published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry journal “suggest a unidirectional association between cannabis use and violence.” In other words, it’s not that already violent people are the ones using cannabis, it’s cannabis that makes people violent.
But whatever the case may be on crime trends, is violent civil disorder really the only consideration for public safety levels now? Is the bar for legalizing a psychotic drug really so low that we’ll justify legalizing it recreationally because “the murder rate hasn’t seen any major spikes”?
It’s time to recognize that recreational marijuana legalization is a failed experiment. Although it is unfortunately too late to feasibly re-ban marijuana in states that have already legalized the drug, the least America can do is learn from Michigan and other drug-friendly states and stop the spread of this insanity.
