The War Against Drugs

This year, Colorado became the first state to legalize recreational marijuana use. Washington will become the second in upcoming months, and the United States Justice Department has sanctioned both states’ efforts by its inaction. A startling number of US voters support legalization, and teens today have the lowest perceptions of marijuana risk in decades. Michael Shao, one of these teens, defended Colorado’s legalization in “The Blunt Truth,” which was published two weeks ago in this paper, carelessly tossing aside decades of detailed scientific research and health advocacy campaigns as anti-pot propaganda, supporting recent changes and therefore dangerous consequences for our youth.As Shao argued, the way we deal with marijuana abuse needs to be reformed to prevent the harmful effects of imprisoning large numbers for non-violent crimes and enforcement’s disproportionate impact on minorities.However, wholesale legalization of marijuana is not the way to do this.Marijuana abuse among minors has permanent negative impacts on mental health, legalization of marijuana increases use among minors, and the new legitimacy will lead businesses to glorify use of this psychologically addictive drug for profit through advertising.Adolescents who regularly use marijuana, beginning during the brain’s period of greatest physiological vulnerability, suffer from irreversible damage to their mental health. An overwhelming amount of research, including longitudinal analysis of decades of data collected in observations such as the Dunedin cohort study that control for socioeconomic status and education show that use among minors leads to a permanent drop in neurological functioning including IQ decline and more frequent mental disorders. The neurotoxic effects of marijuana use among minors that persist even after quitting are scientifically established facts. Dismissing these concerns with the quip “not a single person has died from marijuana overdose,” as Shao and other pot-advocates have attempted, is irresponsible and based on confusion about the impacts of abuse. Legalization in Colorado and Washington only serves to accelerate the spread of such misinformation to minors by undercutting decades of research with the apparent legitimacy of law.Marijuana proponents use the relative dangers of alcohol and tobacco as a tidy way to justify legalization. Besides the claim that marijuana is safer than both being a lie—pot’s concentration of carcinogens is greater than in tobacco, and the IQ damage it causes is unseen in alcohol use—it is based on a misguided view of the reasons for the legality of these drugs. Alcohol and tobacco are not legal because people think they are safe. These poisons are legal because an accident of history has allowed them for centuries to become embedded in mainstream culture, making uprooting them practically impossible. We have the good fortune of having inherited a society in which the dangers of marijuana have stayed at a constant low for decades as Shao admits, not because of the fictional Hearst conspiracy he attempted to propagate but because of this danger’s relative newness. Legalizing cannabis now will only jeopardize the efforts of public health officials to prevent the spread of ideas that marijuana is harmless.Legalization of marijuana will increase its use among minors. Alcohol and tobacco, though illegal for minors, are the most common drugs abused by them, no doubt due to the ease of access. Of all the alcohol consumed in the United States, minors drink 11%, according to the CDC. How hard will it be for teens to steal joints from their parents’ pot cabinets if almost half of US seniors reported drinking within the last month? Marijuana use among minors has increased in states such as California where it has been legalized for medical purposes and in countries such as the Netherlands where it has been effectively decriminalized—a direct contradiction of Shao’s claim that shrinking black markets will make it less accessible. A full legalization of marijuana will have even greater effects on minors’ use, as the decreasing perception of risk associated with the government allowing use for adults will lead to greater usage.If marijuana is legalized, advertising will play a powerful role in increasing rates of underage use. Moving the growth and distribution of marijuana into the hands of corporations with legitimate access to the media opens up channels of advertising, which will not only make control of this health hazard difficult for adults, but also present the strong incentive of marketing towards youth.This situation is not theoretical. The alcohol and tobacco industries have for decades prioritized marketing to minors. Just ask Joe the Camel. A 1991 logo-recognition study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that by age six 91% of Georgia preschoolers who were surveyed could identify the Camel brand’s cartoon mascot, picking out a cigarette icon ostensibly marketed towards adults almost as frequently as the Disney Channel logo. When subjected to constant advertising pressure towards various marijuana brands, intake will increase in groups most at risk. Flavored cigars and cigarettes are already a threat to teenagers—what of flavored joints in candy colored packages?Much as the conclusion of the pro-pot argument published last week misquotes Sojourner Truth’s “Truth is powerful and it prevails,” marijuana advocates have misinterpreted the facts, unable to see that legalization will increase the use among minors of a drug that causes permanent mental health damage to them. To capitulate to marijuana, as has been the tactic in Colorado and Washington, is to sell the health of the youth for tax revenue. It won’t even take one of the countless studies opposing legalization to show which path we should follow. As the Roman statesmen M. Cicero writes in De Legibus, “Salus Populi Suprema Lex”—the health of the people should be the highest law. While classifying marijuana as illegal in all fifty states, we should continue seeking ways to minimize negative effects that persecution has against citizens. The war against drugs is expensive, and it has had many side-effects in the past, but to protect the next generation of America’s youth, it is a war that needs to be fought. 