It’s Time to Reverse Course on Marijuana Legalization

Cannabis legalization is no longer a joke.

With teen use surging and potency at record highs, legal cannabis poses a growing threat to young minds and public health. Illustration by Jens Almroth/Epoch Times

Commentary

There we were, a handful of high school students on stage, pretending we were sitting on a train. It was a rehearsal for our school’s big musical production that year: “The Music Man.”

In this first scene, I was one of the traveling salesmen, bobbing up and down while delivering snappy dialogue. My teenage self thought this was the perfect moment for a bit of fun. So in the middle of the scene, I changed my line, “You can talk all you wanna, but it’s different than it was,” to “You can talk marijuana, but it’s different than it was.” Everyone broke out laughing, and even the director gave me a good-natured laugh as well.

Ah yes, the laughs, the glorious laughs—it seems some teenagers, by nature, will push the envelope to get those laughs, no matter how stupid what they say is. That was me in the 1990s in Michigan, when marijuana use was illegal but also widespread. We live in a different world now, where more than half the nation has legalized or decriminalized marijuana, scientifically known as cannabis. If a teen tried the same joke now, it would probably fall flat. Now, the ubiquitous stink of cannabis in public places and the increasingly disturbing effects that are being revealed to the public are an ever-present reality.

Crying Instead of Laughing

Looking back now at the joke I made in high school, I’m crying instead of laughing. Research over the past decade has now shown clearly how destructive cannabis is to the human body, especially the brain and the heart.

A now-famous large-scale study in 2018 by Amen Clinics, Johns Hopkins University, and other universities looked at more than 60,000 brain scans and found that cannabis abuse led to the brain deteriorating nearly five times more than it does from alcohol abuse. The accelerated aging put the brains of cannabis abusers closer to the brains of people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder than to alcohol abusers.

On the ground, people are literally losing their minds from cannabis, going to the emergency room because of hallucinations, and suffering from paranoia and deteriorated brain functioning. In some, albeit rare, cases cannabis-induced psychosis has led to bizarre, violent murders. It is so bad that less than a year ago, Canada added new warnings on cannabis products, stating that “using cannabis before age 25 can harm brain development [and] increases your risk of mental disorders like psychosis and schizophrenia.”

Researchers are also finding negative effects on people’s hearts. Last March, the American College of Cardiology stated that “two new studies add to mounting evidence that people who use cannabis are more likely to suffer a heart attack.”

There has been an explosion of emergency department visits for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, or cyclical vomiting associated with chronic marijuana use. More than 110,000 people visited emergency departments for the condition between 2016 and 2022. In extreme cases, people scream while vomiting, a phenomenon some call “scromiting.”

“Scromiting” is just the loudest symptom of a quieter, yet massive trend. In 2023, nearly 7 percent of Americans of age 12 and older—19.2 million people—met the criteria for cannabis use disorder. One out of 10 people who have ever used marijuana end up addicted.

The Threat to Our Society

In the past 20 years, cannabis abuse among U.S. teenagers has increased by 245 percent, according to a 2022 Oregon Health and Science University report. Meanwhile, due to growing methods, the potency of cannabis has gone up significantly since I made my joke in the 1990s. Today’s cannabis is at least four times more potent than it was in 1995, according to potency data tracked by the National Center for Natural Products Research.

Marijuana smoke rises from a smoking crowd at a pro-pot "4/20" celebration in front of the state capitol building in Denver on April 20, 2010. John Moore/Getty Images

This is a threat to our society. It may not be popular to prohibit cannabis, but the facts suggest that reversing the trend of legalization is necessary and urgent for protecting teenagers, who are the future of the United States. Many people will, of course, disagree, and they will muddy the waters by comparing cannabis use to alcohol use. Alcohol abuse, like cannabis abuse, is bad for people. In fact, arguably, alcohol is worse. A person can drink himself to death in one sitting, but no one has ever similarly smoked himself to death.

Daily marijuana use surpassed daily alcohol use in 2022.

But this whole alcohol and cannabis comparison is phony and misleading when looking at the big picture of Western civilization. Banning alcohol is an impossibility. Alcohol is rooted in our culture, going back to the Greek gods’ mythical nectar, Jesus Christ’s Last Supper, and American Founding Father Samuel Adams’s malted barley. Simply put, alcohol is a part of our culture that cannot be removed. The government tried with Prohibition in the 1920s, and it was a spectacular failure. Meanwhile, cannabis is a mere blip in history; it has been around widely in the United States only since the 1960s.

Those pushing for cannabis legalization imply that “alcohol is legal, therefore cannabis should be legal.” They turn the argument for legalization into alcohol versus cannabis, disregarding the historical and cultural differences and what is realistically possible. As a society, we have just two choices: (1) alcohol is legal, and cannabis is illegal, as it was before, or (2) both alcohol and cannabis are legal, which is where we are heading now. This is the real, true dichotomy. The plain answer, therefore, is that we are better off fighting one demon instead of two.

As Americans, we love freedom, but the greater the freedom we have, the greater the moral responsibility we bear. Our inconvenient duty now is to turn this dangerous and misguided trajectory of cannabis legalization around. This is not a joke.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.