Let’s not kid ourselves. Pennsylvanians who want to buy adult-use cannabis are just driving across the border to one of our five neighboring states where it’s legal. Up to 60% of the customers at those stores just over the border are Pennsylvanians, and we’re losing out on an industry that will bring in $1.3 billion in new revenue to our Commonwealth. Let’s work together — Republicans and Democrats alike — and legalize adult-use cannabis.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro
The number one thing I smell right now is pot. It’s like everyone’s smoking a joint now.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams
The entire country seems to have accepted the inevitability of marijuana (cannabis) legalization.
Indeed, one of the few regional holdouts against legalizing recreational marijuana, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has a renewed push to get with the times and make it legal. Legalizing pot has wide bipartisan support, and so it makes sense that Governor Josh Shapiro, who fashions himself as a sensible centrist Democrat working across party lines, would board the bandwagon. New Yorkers can complain about the smell all they want—and they do complain a lot—but this rather bad-smelling wagon seems to have too much momentum to stop.
However, if you care about mental health at all, you should jump off that bandwagon. The marijuana industry sold the American people a lie. Any honest assessment of the evidence reveals that, contrary to the narratives pitched by supporters, marijuana is really awful for mental health.
You’ll notice that Shapiro doesn’t talk about the mental health consequences of his preferred policy. That is not an accident. Such a conversation would be excruciatingly inconvenient for him. Scientific studies have long shown that marijuana use is associated with increases in mental health disorders like schizophrenia and depression all over the world, including the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand. And this negative effect of marijuana hasn’t suddenly disappeared in the modern era. In fact, a recent analysis of multiple studies revealed that 25% of medicinal marijuana users develop an addictive disorder that negatively impacts their lives. Consider that prescribing opioids for pain leads to comparatively much lower addiction rates, often less than 5%. The lack of attention given to debilitating marijuana addiction is thus curious in the cold light of reason. No one seems to question the veritable epidemic of people becoming badly addicted to opioids via pain management, and yet the much higher problems associated with cannabis seem largely ignored.
Some people respond, as Shapiro does, that legalization is not relevant because people will get marijuana anyway. But if you are hoping to thread that vanishingly small needle, think again. In fact, research shows that mental health problems associated with cannabis can be tied directly to legalization. In a recent JAMA network paper that included over 13 million participants, Myran and colleagues compared the schizophrenia levels of populations in areas that had legalized cannabis during pre- and post-legalization eras. They show cannabis legalization substantially increased mental health issues, concluding: “These findings suggest that the association between cannabis use disorders and schizophrenia is an important consideration for the legalization of cannabis.”
Well, it should be an important consideration, but Josh Shapiro does not seem to consider it. Josh Shapiro is more worried about the money his government can bring in than the disastrous mental health costs to his citizens.
Importantly, this isn’t just an issue for people who use marijuana. It is an issue for all the rest of us who don’t. People who use marijuana are, on average, less productive citizens. For example, studies in France and the United States show that marijuana users are less likely to hold down jobs. The authors of the study summed up their results with cold scientific insight: “Findings indicate that job loss may be an overlooked social cost of marijuana use for U.S. workers.”
That social cost is our social cost.
Other research shows that people who use marijuana are also more likely to go to the emergency room with injuries. They are more likely to crash their cars. The list of stuff marijuana users do badly is very long. On average, they aren’t very productive citizens. When people don’t work, all of us pay. When people need extra medical care, all of us pay. When people need more addiction psychiatric services, all of us pay. When people get into accidents on the road because they are high, all of us pay.
The fact that marijuana has negative effects doesn’t de facto mean we should ban it, of course. I’m a live-and-let live freedom guy. We should consider these things in terms of a cost/benefit analysis where “loss of freedom” is a huge cost in the equation. Everything has negative effects. Baseball has negative effects, too. So does driving. I don’t want you to ban everything in my life you think has bad effects on me, and I don’t want to ban everything in your life that I think has bad effects on you.
With that in mind, here is my message to those of you who support legalization: Honestly, if I truly believed that you were going to use your weed in the privacy of your own home—and that was the end of it—I would be fine with this. What you do to yourself in your own home is none of my business. I don’t have to like it; it is literally a free country.
However, the truth is that I just don’t believe you. I don’t think this is about freedom for you to do what you want in your own home. I don’t trust you that you’ll constrain your habit to that. I believe that you’ll bring it to our streets, our parks, the places we work, the places we eat and drink coffee. Your freedom in this instance isn’t just doing what you want in your own home; it is about doing things that make my world a far worse place.
And then there’s this. I have a hard time taking the freedom-to-choose argument seriously from a group of people who constantly argue for freedom restrictions for some greater purpose. If, as liberals claim, they believe in health mandates for the public good, then banning marijuana is an absolute no brainer. It is much easier to rationally argue for this government intervention than it is to argue we should have been forced to take the COVID vaccine, or (on a different front entirely) that we should support the stifling government bureaucracy currently destroying independent businesses.
It turns out we all have our pet freedoms. So, in the live-and-let-live spirit, I’ll make a deal with all of you who want to legalize recreational marijuana. You agree to legislation that gets rid of business-stifling bureaucracy and enshrines vaccine freedom into law, and then I’ll offer my full support for your cannabis legislation. Until then—until liberals who support this truly show this is about freedom and not about dragging the soul of our society to cannabis hell—I’m going to offer a hard pass.
Sadly, given the inertia this issue has even with Republicans, I fear that we’ll just have to learn our lessons the hard way by suffering through the consequences of legalization. But when that happens, don’t imagine for one second that the terrible outcomes were surprising or unpredictable. They were fully known to anyone who cared enough to look.
Be sure to check out this video.
To foster informed citizens and address this critical social policy from a distinctly Christian perspective, the Institute for Faith & Freedom hosted Dan Bartkowiak (GCC ’07), Chief Strategy Officer for Pennsylvania Family and Spokesman for the Truth on Weed Project, for a lecture entitled “Truth on Weed: A Christian Response to Marijuana Legalization.”
Click here to watch Dan’s talk.