Reefer madness is back. In an article in The Atlantic earlier this week, headlined “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts,” Annie Lowery sounded the klaxon on cannabis use disorder. “Users or former users I spoke with described lost jobs, lost marriages, lost houses, lost money, lost time. Foreclosures and divorces,” she writes. “Weight gain and mental-health problems. And one other thing: the problem of convincing other people that what they were experiencing was real.” But she’s here to tell us that it is. Oh, it is.
“Cannabis is potentially a real public-health problem,” said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University. “It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when 9 percent of self-reported cannabis users over the last month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent.” They argue that state and local governments are setting up legal regimes without sufficient public-health protection, with some even warning that the country is replacing one form of reefer madness with another, careening from treating cannabis as if it were as dangerous as heroin to treating it as if it were as benign as kombucha.
Vox seconded the warning, highlighting a particularly persuasive quote:
For Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, the most compelling evidence of the deleterious effects comes from users themselves. “In large national surveys, about one in 10 people who smoke it say they have a lot of problems. They say things like, ‘I have trouble quitting. I think a lot about quitting and I can’t do it. I smoked more than I intended to. I neglect responsibilities.’ There are plenty of people who have problems with it, in terms of things like concentration, short-term memory, and motivation,” he said. “People will say, ‘Oh, that’s just you fuddy-duddy doctors.’ Actually, no. It’s millions of people who use the drug who say that it causes problems.”
Well, yes. About 10% of users of anything will overuse or get addicted to anything. But if people can kick nicotine, is it really that hard to kick the weed, wherever it falls on the evil scale?
At least Vox stresses that just because marijuana isn’t entirely benign doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be legalized. But neither piece stresses an important point: Because weed is absurdly listed as a Schedule I drug, woefully little research on health effects has been done considering how widespread usage has been over the past 50 years. Knowing the risks might be the most persuasive method of convincing people to consume responsibly.