This piece came to me in my email this afternoon, which will be morning in the USA - Wed 17th May 2023

By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist

Legalizing Marijuana Is A Big Mistake

"Of all the ways to win a culture war, the smoothest is to just make the other side seem hopelessly uncool. So it’s been with the march of marijuana legalization: There have been moral arguments about the excesses of the drug war and medical arguments about the potential benefits of pot, but the vibe of the whole debate has pitted the chill against the uptight, the cool against the square, the relaxed future against the Principal Skinners of the past.

As support for legalization has climbed, commanding a two-thirds majority in recent polling, any contrary argument has come to feel a bit futile, and even modest cavils are couched in an apologetic and defensive style. Of course I don’t question the right to get high, but perhaps the pervasive smell of weed in our cities is a bit unfortunate …? I’m not a narc or anything, but maybe New York City doesn’t need quite so many unlicensed pot dealers … ‌ ?

All of this means that it will take a long time for conventional wisdom to acknowledge the truth that seems readily apparent to squares like me: Marijuana legalization as we’ve done it so far has been a policy failure, a potential social disaster, a clear and evident mistake.
The best version of the square’s case is an essay by Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute explaining his own evolution from youthful libertarian to grown-up prohibitionist. It will not convince readers who come in with stringently libertarian presuppositions — who believe on high principle that consenting adults should be able to purchase, sell and enjoy almost any substance short of fentanyl, and that no second-order social consequence can justify infringing on this right.

But Lehman explains in detail why the second-order effects of marijuana legalization have mostly vindicated the pessimists and skeptics. First, on the criminal justice front, the expectation that legalizing pot would help reduce America’s prison population by clearing out nonviolent offenders was always overdrawn, since marijuana convictions made up a small share of the incarceration rate even at its height. But Lehman argues that there is also no good evidence so far that legalization reduces racially discriminatory patterns of policing and arrests. In his view cops often use marijuana as a pretext to search someone they suspect of a more serious crime, and they simply substitute some other pretext when the law changes, leaving arrest rates basically unchanged.

So legalization isn’t necessarily striking a great blow against mass incarceration or for racial justice. Nor is it doing great things for public health. There was hope, and some early evidence, that legal pot might substitute for opioid use, but some of the more recent data cuts the other way: A new paper published in the Journal of Health Economics finds that “legal medical marijuana, particularly when available through retail dispensaries, is associated with higher opioid mortality.” There are therapeutic benefits to cannabis that justify its availability for prescription, but the evidence for its risks keeps increasing: This month brought a new paper strengthening the link between heavy pot use and the onset of schizophrenia in young men.

And the broad downside risks of marijuana, beyond extreme dangers like schizophrenia, remain as evident as ever: A form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn’t mortally dangerous in the way of heroin but that can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives. Most casual pot smokers won’t have this experience, but the legalization era has seen a dramatic increase the number of non-casual users. Occasional use has risen substantially since 2008, but daily or near-daily use is up much more, with around 1‌‌6 million Americans, out of ‌more than 50 million users, now suffering from what ‌‌is termed “marijuana use disorder.”
In theory there are technocratic responses to these unfortunate trends. In its ideal form legalization would be accompanied by effective regulation and taxation, and as Lehman notes, on paper it should be possible to discourage addiction by raising taxes in the legal market, effectively nudging users toward more casual consumption.

In practice it hasn’t worked that way. Because of all the years of prohibition, a mature and supple illegal marketplace already exists, ready to undercut whatever prices the legal market charges. So to make the legal marketplace successful and amenable to regulation you would probably need much more enforcement against the illegal marketplace — which is difficult and expensive and, again, obviously uncool, in conflict with the good-vibrations spirit of the legalizers.

Then you have the extreme case of New York, where legal permitting has lagged while untold numbers of illegal shops are doing business unmolested by the police. But even in less-incompetent-seeming states and localities, a similar pattern persists. Lehman cites (and has reviewed) the recent book “Can Legal Weed Win? The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics,” by Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, which shows that the cost of unlicensed weed can be as much as 50 percent lower than the cost of the licensed variety. So the more you tax and regulate legal pot sales, the more you run the risk of having users just switch to the black market — and if you want the licensed market to crowd out the black market instead, you probably need to legal pot as cheap as possible, which in turn undermines any effort to discourage chronic, life-altering abuse.

Thus policymakers who don’t want so much chronic use and personal degradation have two options. They can set out to design a much more effective (but necessarily expensive, complex and sometimes punitive) system of regulation and enforcement than what exists so far. Or they can reach for the blunt instrument of re-criminalization, which Lehman prefers for its simplicity — with medical exceptions still carved out, and with the possibility that possession could remain legal and that only production and distribution be prohibited.

I expect legalization to advance much further before either of these alternatives builds significant support. But eventually the culture will recognize that under the banner of personal choice, we’re running a general experiment in exploitation — addicting our more vulnerable neighbors to myriad pleasant-seeming vices, handing our children over to the social media dopamine-machine and spreading degradation wherever casinos spring up and weed shops flourish.

With that realization, and only with that realization, will the squares get the hearing they deserve.

Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.”

Source: The New York Times
 
This piece came to me in my email this afternoon, which will be morning in the USA - Wed 17th May 2023 I suppose I shouldn't be copy pasting since this is behind a paywall, but imo it should be seen.

By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist

"Of all the ways to win a culture war, the smoothest is to just make the other side seem hopelessly uncool. So it’s been with the march of marijuana legalization: There have been moral arguments about the excesses of the drug war and medical arguments about the potential benefits of pot, but the vibe of the whole debate has pitted the chill against the uptight, the cool against the square, the relaxed future against the Principal Skinners of the past.

As support for legalization has climbed, commanding a two-thirds majority in recent polling, any contrary argument has come to feel a bit futile, and even modest cavils are couched in an apologetic and defensive style. Of course I don’t question the right to get high, but perhaps the pervasive smell of weed in our cities is a bit unfortunate …? I’m not a narc or anything, but maybe New York City doesn’t need quite so many unlicensed pot dealers … ‌ ?

All of this means that it will take a long time for conventional wisdom to acknowledge the truth that seems readily apparent to squares like me: Marijuana legalization as we’ve done it so far has been a policy failure, a potential social disaster, a clear and evident mistake.
The best version of the square’s case is an essay by Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute explaining his own evolution from youthful libertarian to grown-up prohibitionist. It will not convince readers who come in with stringently libertarian presuppositions — who believe on high principle that consenting adults should be able to purchase, sell and enjoy almost any substance short of fentanyl, and that no second-order social consequence can justify infringing on this right.

But Lehman explains in detail why the second-order effects of marijuana legalization have mostly vindicated the pessimists and skeptics. First, on the criminal justice front, the expectation that legalizing pot would help reduce America’s prison population by clearing out nonviolent offenders was always overdrawn, since marijuana convictions made up a small share of the incarceration rate even at its height. But Lehman argues that there is also no good evidence so far that legalization reduces racially discriminatory patterns of policing and arrests. In his view cops often use marijuana as a pretext to search someone they suspect of a more serious crime, and they simply substitute some other pretext when the law changes, leaving arrest rates basically unchanged.

So legalization isn’t necessarily striking a great blow against mass incarceration or for racial justice. Nor is it doing great things for public health. There was hope, and some early evidence, that legal pot might substitute for opioid use, but some of the more recent data cuts the other way: A new paper published in the Journal of Health Economics finds that “legal medical marijuana, particularly when available through retail dispensaries, is associated with higher opioid mortality.” There are therapeutic benefits to cannabis that justify its availability for prescription, but the evidence for its risks keeps increasing: This month brought a new paper strengthening the link between heavy pot use and the onset of schizophrenia in young men.

And the broad downside risks of marijuana, beyond extreme dangers like schizophrenia, remain as evident as ever: A form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn’t mortally dangerous in the way of heroin but that can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives. Most casual pot smokers won’t have this experience, but the legalization era has seen a dramatic increase the number of non-casual users. Occasional use has risen substantially since 2008, but daily or near-daily use is up much more, with around 1‌‌6 million Americans, out of ‌more than 50 million users, now suffering from what ‌‌is termed “marijuana use disorder.”
In theory there are technocratic responses to these unfortunate trends. In its ideal form legalization would be accompanied by effective regulation and taxation, and as Lehman notes, on paper it should be possible to discourage addiction by raising taxes in the legal market, effectively nudging users toward more casual consumption.

In practice it hasn’t worked that way. Because of all the years of prohibition, a mature and supple illegal marketplace already exists, ready to undercut whatever prices the legal market charges. So to make the legal marketplace successful and amenable to regulation you would probably need much more enforcement against the illegal marketplace — which is difficult and expensive and, again, obviously uncool, in conflict with the good-vibrations spirit of the legalizers.

Then you have the extreme case of New York, where legal permitting has lagged while untold numbers of illegal shops are doing business unmolested by the police. But even in less-incompetent-seeming states and localities, a similar pattern persists. Lehman cites (and has reviewed) the recent book “Can Legal Weed Win? The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics,” by Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, which shows that the cost of unlicensed weed can be as much as 50 percent lower than the cost of the licensed variety. So the more you tax and regulate legal pot sales, the more you run the risk of having users just switch to the black market — and if you want the licensed market to crowd out the black market instead, you probably need to legal pot as cheap as possible, which in turn undermines any effort to discourage chronic, life-altering abuse.

Thus policymakers who don’t want so much chronic use and personal degradation have two options. They can set out to design a much more effective (but necessarily expensive, complex and sometimes punitive) system of regulation and enforcement than what exists so far. Or they can reach for the blunt instrument of re-criminalization, which Lehman prefers for its simplicity — with medical exceptions still carved out, and with the possibility that possession could remain legal and that only production and distribution be prohibited.

I expect legalization to advance much further before either of these alternatives builds significant support. But eventually the culture will recognize that under the banner of personal choice, we’re running a general experiment in exploitation — addicting our more vulnerable neighbors to myriad pleasant-seeming vices, handing our children over to the social media dopamine-machine and spreading degradation wherever casinos spring up and weed shops flourish.

With that realization, and only with that realization, will the squares get the hearing they deserve.


The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
What a crock of 💩 ! Live n let live A-hole! Prolly anti-everything that is leaning towards the left. Some people make me want to puke 🤮. Smh I’m going to stop 🛑 before I get in trouble. CL🍀
 
there is always going to be some push back to progress. what the author doesn't take into account is the genie is now out of the bottle.
 
He's very conservative, it's an op-ed piece, his take on things. I heartily disagree with many of his "observations".


you need to remember most conservatives define folk not by who is in, but rather by who is out.

most canna friendly folk are inclusive, they don't care who the fuck you love or what colour you are, and they love their children and don't want to see their heads blown off in school.

more and more conservatives have a hard time squaring that. but you won't see most of them here, because canna culture is primarily "other" ... out of their clubs and tribe. canna culture has always been "counter" to hate.
 
you need to remember most conservatives define folk not by who is in, but rather by who is out.

most canna friendly folk are inclusive, they don't care who the fuck you love or what colour you are, and they love their children and don't want to see their heads blown off in school.

more and more conservatives have a hard time squaring that. but you won't see most of them here, because canna culture is primarily "other" ... out of their clubs and tribe. canna culture has always been "counter" to hate.
Souds a lot better than Bull Shit. Very well put.
 
It's actually not a bad article and a lot of what he is talking about has some merit. Does he stretch things out for his story....yep. He has to write whatever it takes to get folks talking. Do I agree with him? Mostly no, but I bet it will help sell "paper" or whatever and he'll keep his job and the tv news crews will pick up the story and everyone will be talking and buddy whats his name did his job :cough::ganjamon:
 
To me the article comes off as being quite an authority on the subject. I find it dangerous that this is now fodder for the chattering classes.

I think we are fortunate that Rob runs a tight ship here. People in canna are from ALL walks of life and you are fortunate if you only have had good experiences. There are some quite menacing types and many with horribly conservative political views who grow and smoke ganja. What I am saying is ganga smokers are not a homogenous, peace loving, inclusive tribe imo.

:passitleft:
 
It's actually not a bad article and a lot of what he is talking about has some merit.

if he's quaking in his slippers at night over the fact the black market undercuts the legal, then he should get off his business conservative ass, and campaign to get the onerous directed taxes off the law abiding legal outlets.
 
It's actually not a bad article and a lot of what he is talking about has some merit. Does he stretch things out for his story....yep. He has to write whatever it takes to get folks talking. Do I agree with him? Mostly no, but I bet it will help sell "paper" or whatever and he'll keep his job and the tv news crews will pick up the story and everyone will be talking and buddy whats his name did his job
It must be at least a half-way decent "opinion column" judging on how it got people to discussing the topic.

The guy is entitled to his opinion whether it is right or wrong. If the readers jump up and criticize him because they do not like or agree with his opinion then they are doing what they claim to be against which is judging someone not on who they are but on something arbitrary like the length of their hair or the color of their skin.

So, yes, it is his opinion, not a news story, and yes, he is entitled to it. It does not mean that anyone else, has to agree with the opinion. They just to agree that it is his right to have it.
 
It must be at least a half-way decent "opinion column" judging on how it got people to discussing the topic.

The guy is entitled to his opinion whether it is right or wrong. If the readers jump up and criticize him because they do not like or agree with his opinion then they are doing what they claim to be against which is judging someone not on who they are but on something arbitrary like the length of their hair or the color of their skin.

So, yes, it is his opinion, not a news story, and yes, he is entitled to it. It does not mean that anyone else, has to agree with the opinion. They just to agree that it is his right to have it.
It is a sponsored opinion. Opinions matter. I don't see anyone here making ad hominums. If people do not push back on opinions like this one, people will live in an echo chamber of conservative prohibition ad infinitum.
 
It must be at least a half-way decent "opinion column" judging on how it got people to discussing the topic.

The guy is entitled to his opinion whether it is right or wrong. If the readers jump up and criticize him because they do not like or agree with his opinion then they are doing what they claim to be against which is judging someone not on who they are but on something arbitrary like the length of their hair or the color of their skin.

So, yes, it is his opinion, not a news story, and yes, he is entitled to it. It does not mean that anyone else, has to agree with the opinion. They just to agree that it is his right to have it.
Exactly
 
Opinions are swinging on canna in my state, they, the public, are watching Oregon street views on the news every night and equate the hard drug trade to our beloved plant, simple fricking plant. But it is. Somehow, someone needs to get out in front this growing mindset and separate pot from other drugs. Where is NORMAL now?
 
As long as humans live, other humans will believe they have the right and authority to decide what people can and cannot do with their lives, and which of us actually deserve rights to our own lives and autonomy. They have no qualms about using the threat of state violence to force their hypocrisy on the rest of us.
 
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