Beware perils of legal pot
New York appears primed to charge headlong into full legalization of marijuana for recreational use, driven more by election-year politics than hard facts and sober analysis. We need to smarten up and slow down.
In the Democratic primary for governor, newcomer Cynthia Nixon has staked out a position popular on the party’s left wing, best summarized as: full legalization, right now, without further debate or discussion.
“In 2018, in a blue state like New York, marijuana shouldn’t even be an issue,” Nixon says in a campaign video. “If there was more political courage coming out of Albany, we would have done this already.”
Nixon’s stance has nudged Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who until now has been a cautious skeptic. He initially limited the legalization of medical marijuana and described pot as a “gateway drug” that can lead to use of more serious substances and addiction.
With Nixon’s arrival in the race, Cuomo is systematically trying to snatch issues (and voters) away from Nixon — and has already signaled he’s likely to do the same on marijuana.
“I will change my opinion when the facts change. And the facts have changed on marijuana,” Cuomo told me recently, noting that full legalization in New Jersey and other nearby states means New York may soon have little choice but to follow suit.
That conveniently enables him to make another Nixon campaign plank moot. It’s good politics for Cuomo — but it might not be good government.
New York City has rightly dialed back the criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of weed for personal use. And there’s certainly an argument for removing marijuana from the federal list of Schedule I drugs, defined as substances with “a high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”
The current federal classification is simply inaccurate. A solid body of medical literature supports the use of marijuana products to provide relief from chemotherapyrelated nausea, reduce seizures from a rare form of epilepsy, and treat symptoms of multiple sclerosis and post-traumatic stress. There’s evidence that marijuana can be a substitute for, and wean users away from, opioids.
So New York and the 28 others states that have legalized medical marijuana have every good reason to pressure the federal government into reclassifying pot as a Schedule II drug with legitimate medical uses — as well as some harmful properties and a potential for physical and psychological dependence.
And make no mistake: the evidence points to a number of harmful effects. An advocacy group called Smart Approaches to Marijuana notes that nine public health studies published over the last 20 years found “drivers who test positive for marijuana or self-report using marijuana are more than twice as likely as other drivers to be involved in motor vehicle crashes.”
We don’t have solid numbers on how combining alcohol and weed affects traffic safety. But we do know that marijuana can have a negative impact on lung and heart health, and is not recommended for pregnant and nursing women or young teens whose brains are still developing.
Yasmin Hurd, a neuroscientist and director of the Addiction Institute at Mt. Sinai hospital, put it bluntly in a recent edition of Time magazine. “We need a broad agreement on the science and the medicine, and we just don’t have it yet,” she says.
We should also be wary about the supposed social justice benefit of legalization — namely, an end to mass arrests and incarceration of low-income blacks and Latinos. SAM, citing police data from Colorado, found that “in the two years after Colorado legalized marijuana, the number of Hispanic and black kids arrested for marijuana-related offenses rose 29 and 58 percent, respectively. In the same period, the number of white kids being arrested for identical crimes dropped eight percent.”
Today’s call for a quick leap into the unknown carries an unmistakable echo of the heated political atmosphere in which the notorious Rockefeller drug laws were passed in 1973, driven by an ambitious New York governor in his third term with an eye on the White House.
Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, frustrated with rising crime and drug-use numbers, told startled members of his cabinet to push for 15-year sentences for anybody selling even small amounts of drugs. Five months later it was the law of the land.
It then took decades of effort — and countless lives destroyed by the draconian sentences — to fix Rockefeller’s hastily conceived policies. New York should thoughtfully examine all the risks and benefits of marijuana legalization, lest we once again make a costly mistake.