Decriminalizing pot: Council right to proceed but with caution

Columbus City Council appears inclined to consider decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, as some other Ohio cities already have done. The council is to hold a hearing on the matter on Thursday. We’re glad to see the discussion, but we also support the caution city officials are voicing.

As marijuana becomes legal for medicinal and recreational use in more states and cities across the country, wider use everywhere is inevitable. Prosecuting people for using and possessing small amounts is becoming a more and more pointless way to spend public time and money.

But blanket legalization isn’t a simple matter, mainly because too little is known about the long-term effects of cannabis use.

We don’t suggest that greater recreational use (and potential abuse) of marijuana presents no problems. But consider the tremendous societal damage caused by alcohol abuse — harm our society has chosen to tolerate.

In that light, it doesn’t seem fair to continue to punish people for marijuana use, especially considering that the penalties fall most heavily on poor people who lack the savvy or the means a wealthier person can use to navigate the court system. If a defendant can’t pay a fine or hire a lawyer to plea-bargain or misses a court date, a marijuana citation can turn into an arrest warrant and a life derailed.

To set good public marijuana policy, for both medicinal and recreational use, more information — about what levels are safe, under what conditions someone should be considered impaired for driving and what restrictions should be imposed — is urgently needed.

Medical professionals are largely in the dark about cannabis because the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 designated it as a Schedule I drug — those

considered to have no currently accepted medicinal value, a lack of safety and a high potential for abuse.

That makes cannabis ineligible for public medical research funding and even difficult to obtain a privately funded study. The most comprehensive work so far was done in 2017 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which analyzed 10,000 other small studies.

Among the most conclusive findings — those based on the strongest evidence — were that cannabis is effective for treating chronic pain, muscle spasms related to muscular dystrophy and the nausea and lack of appetite associated with chemotherapy; that regular cannabis smokers are more likely to get bronchitis; and that pregnant women who smoke it are more likely to have low-weight babies.

Less-certain findings were that cannabis does not carry the cancer risks of smoking tobacco and that it is correlated to impaired academic achievement.

The study’s bottom line, though, is that much more direct research is needed.

It’s unfortunate that the decriminalization push is happening before the medical risks and benefits are well understood, but continuing to punish marijuana users disproportionately isn’t necessarily the best course.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has refused to change cannabis’s classification despite numerous requests starting in 1972. This is entirely unjustified; cannabis clearly has accepted medicinal value. We hope a recent federal appeals court ruling, ordering the DEA to reconsider the classification, brings a change.

If future research shows marijuana to be more harmful than people believed, then public health campaigns like those against tobacco and alcohol abuse — not criminal prosecution — might be the fairest and most effective response.