Rare News Desk
As Colorado, Washington and other states now legalize marijuana, predictably some have begun to express why they think this is a bad idea. In his Townhall column “5 Reasons Marijuana Should Remain Illegal,” Right Wing News’ John Hawkins asks, “how is it that cigarette smokers are pariahs while people smoking weed are being cheered?”
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I suspect it has to do with the fact that about 443,000 deaths each year in the US are attributable to cigarette smoking, while about zero have been attributable to marijuana (excluding driving fatalities caused under the influence, which is miniscule).
As you could’ve guessed from his title, Hawkins gives five arguments against marijuana legalization, though I think some of them can be lumped together and addressed in the same fashion.
The first argument is, “It’s extremely addictive for people.” Addiction is often confused with harm. Surely caffeine is an addictive, but not harmful by a longshot.
Hawkins third, fourth, and fifth arguments he lists are that marijuana is terrible for mental health, physical health, and decimates lives.
Relative to other drugs, marijuana is hardly addictive. While 56% of Americans have used marijuana by their 20s, marijuana users only make up 16% of people in addiction treatment. By contrast, only 2% of people in the same age group have used heroin, but make up 14% of those in treatment – a largely disproportionate figure. Hawkins provides an anecdote from Dr. Drew that the addicts he sees have a harder time overcoming marijuana addiction than cocaine addiction, but the data shows Drew’s statement to be just that – an anecdote.
Regardless, the statistics Hawkins cites claim that 7.3 million people aged 12 or older have some sort of dependence to an illicit drug. Among them, 4.3 million had marijuana “dependence or abuse.” The stat comes from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The key flaw in the statistic is the “or abuse” segment, as the government has a laughable measure of defining abuse in other areas.
For example, The Centers for Disease Control (a federal agency that’s part of the HHS) claims that 38 million Americans abuse alcohol. How do they calculate this figure? Quite simple: anyone under the age of 21 who has a sip of alcohol is “abusing” it, and anyone above the legal age having 4-5 drinks within a period of 2-3 hours is abusing alcohol. For women, as little as 8 drinks a week qualifies as alcohol abuse to the CDC. For reasons like this, governmental statistics for what qualifies as “abuse” should be taken with a grain of salt.
If prohibition prevents drug addiction, I have yet to see the data to support the claim. The nation’s drug addiction rate has remained at around a steady 1.3% since the beginning of the war on drugs, despite shelling out $1.5 trillion in expenditures.
When it comes to the effects of marijuana on physical and mental health, it should be noted that according to a study published in The Lancet, the most harmful drug is already legal—alcohol.
Not only is alcohol more harmful than marijuana, it’s more harmful than heroin, crack cocaine, and methamphetamines. The study takes into account the harm drugs do to non-users, so while heroin, crack, and meth may cause more harm to the user than alcohol would, people who abuse alcohol cause more harm to others.
Hawkins shares a concern that I used to have – that more drug use will mean less people working, and therefore more people on the dole. This fear was dispelled for me when Florida began drug testing welfare recipients – and it turned out that they used drugs at a rate about half that of the general population (if we assume that recipients who refused to take the drug test did so because they were users).
Hawkins second argument, which I’ve skipped over thus far, is that marijuana legalization hasn’t worked out well for Amsterdam. I address the second argument last because it has to do with crime, while the other arguments provided are much more health oriented.
The reasons for failure that Hawkins cites are that 1) Amsterdam has to make it illegal for kids to smoke marijuana at school (supposedly because kids smoking during school is a growing problem there), and that 2) crime in Amsterdam has been centering around coffeehouses where Marijuana is sold. The first point is meaningless, because this is also the law… in the US. As for the second point, the article he quotes from states that “In particular, the absence of legal means for coffee shops to obtain cannabis has highlighted their association with organized crime,” which seems to suggest that this problem only exists because of a shortage of legal sellers.
Regardless, not a single statistic is cited to show that this is a rising problem, let alone an actual problem.
Overall, associating marijuana with crime is ironic, because it completely ignores that drug prohibition is an enormous cause of crime. When transactions are driven underground, either party can use force to obtain their desired product. In 1994, the Department of Justice estimated that between 5%-25% of all homicides were drug-related. By contrast, we can reasonably assume that the number of people murdered in Colorado’s marijuana dispensaries will hover around zero in years to come.
Perhaps my favorite part of the article is when Hawkins says “movies portray potheads as harmless, fun-loving people who spend their time giggling and munching Cheetos, but they don’t show these people when they’re flunking out of school, losing their jobs, frustrated because they can’t concentrate or losing the love of their lives because they don’t want to be a pot smoking loser anymore.” When 56% of people have smoked pot by age 20 and the unemployment rate is below 7%, it’s safe to say that the drug isn’t causing people to miss work. The only study Hawkins cited that would indicate as much had a sample size of 129.
But Hawkins does have a point when it comes to education. After all, where would pot smoking losers and dropouts like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs be today if only they hadn’t dropped out of school?
