Provocations: The lawyers’ next big target - marijuana
It was lawyers who finally put Big Tobacco in its place.
Their product liability suits brought in massive settlements that hit the tobacco industry in its most sensitive spot — the corporate bottom line.
Is the marijuana industry next — just as it seems to be gaining ground via state-bystate legalization?
It just might be. Stay tuned. The blossoming marijuana industry will be nipped in the bud if the legal views of David G. Evans, a Flemington, N.J., attorney, prevail.
He’s gathering a force of antimarijuana litigators to sue the bejeebers out of the nascent marijuana industry. He’s doing so through an initiative that goes by the acronym CIVEL — “Cannabis Industry Victims Educating Litigators.”
CIVEL provides scientific and legal guidance for personal-injury lawyers to take on the marijuana hustlers. These hustlers have now attained the villainous, deep-pockets status of being designated an “industry.”
You know for sure that marijuana has attained such status when Acreage Holdings, a medical and recreational marijuana corporation, installs a former Speaker of the House, Republican John Boehner, on its corporate “advisory board” and sends him forth as an industry spokesman and lobbyist for legalization.
The marijuana industry’s bankrollers are “greedy, aggressive, venal, money-grubbing sons-of-bitches,” says Evans. “But so are the personal-injury lawyers,” he says, adding: “I’m one of them, by the way.”
Reviled though they may be, the personal-injury lawyers — unlike the politicians — aren’t afraid to take on the big guys, as they did the tobacco industry, says Evans. If there’s money to be made in lawsuits, the lawyers won’t hesitate to go after it, he adds.
Before he was a personal-injury lawyer, Evans was a research scientist for the N.J. Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse. He scoffs at those who say marijuana is a harmless substance, and more so at those who go even further and say it’s a beneficial wonder drug.
For their part. pro-marijuana activists are inclined to dismiss adversaries like Evans as latter-day Harry J. Anslingers. Anslinger was America’s first drug czar. He’s usually depicted as a buffoonish, unhip, anti-pot hysteric.
But Evans is more inclined to stick to the science and law regarding cannabis than to indulge in “Reefer Madness” hyperbole.
“Reefer Madness” was a campy, 1936 anti-marijuana film that remains to this day a yuckit-up cult classic among the propot Zonker set.
The film was sponsored by a church group, “Tell Your Children.”
And that today happens to be the ironic title of a book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. The book warns about the downsides of cannabis.
Contrary to everything you’ve read or been told, there is indeed well researched reason to be concerned about the harmful effects of marijuana, says the Yale-educated Berenson.
The full title of his book is “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.”
He cites numerous studies pointing to marijuana as a significant factor in aggravating or precipitating, for example, schizophrenia.
If you check online, you’ll see sniping criticism asserting that Berenson’s book cites no studies. Or that it cites only out-of-date studies. (Um, which is it? It can’t be both.)
The criticism is false and likely willfully so. The whole point of the Berenson book is to cite — by author, title and publication — the many studies that have, in the author’s description, “piled up.” These studies have been mostly ignored by a media that views its pro-pot bias as proof of hipness.
Putting the lie to critics, one chapter of Berenson’s book is titled “Study After Study,” which, true to the title, cites one study after another — scores of studies conducted by credentialed researchers and published in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.
Among the research the book cites is a 2018 study in Britain, published in the American Medical Association’s journal, Psychiatry. The study reported that cannabis tripled frequent users’ psychiatric symptoms. (Is 2018 so far back it’s out of date?)
Another 2018 study published in the Journal of Psychology reported a significantly greater risk of opioid abuse among those who had been using marijuana for three years or more. This casts doubt on the dogma that marijuana is absolutely never a “gateway drug” to stronger stuff.
The studies Berenson cites range over the world, from ones in the Netherlands to Switzerland to Finland to New Zealand.
Attorney Evans, too, focuses on the research — with legal liability issues uppermost in mind.
Study after study once also showed the harmful effects of tobacco.
Yet the tobacco industry ignored the research as it piled up — until the plaintiffs’ lawyers struck with their blitz of litigation.
The tobacco litigation was “one of the greatest things that ever happened” regarding public health, in Evans’ view. Lawsuits can have a dramatic “educational effect” that even scientific studies tend not to have, he says.
Meanwhile, though, he cites scientific studies — for example, a 2007 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry declaring it “incontrovertible” that regular use of high-potency marijuana increases the risk of psychosis symptoms by a factor of five.
Is 2007 too old? Okay, Evans
cites a 2017 study in the Journal of Addiction Research and Therapy reporting a significant link between marijuana use and “increased aggression, paranoia and personality change.”
He points out a 2017 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association linking marijuana smoking during pregnancy to “neurocognitive” problems in later childhood.
And he cites a 2015 study in the journal European Psychopharmacology reporting a statistically significant link between cannabis use and the impairment of users’ behavioral “inhibiting control processes.”
The cavalcade of studies goes on and on.
When incidents of unsocial or criminal behavior come to the attention of law enforcement and medical personnel, the routine inquires they make aren’t likely to include questions about marijuana use. That would not be hip. But this attitude may be changing.
Evans cites, for example, a 2017 study by the Secret Service Threat Assessment Center. It examined 28 threat cases in depth and did inquire about marijuana use. The study reported marijuana use to have been a factor present in over half the cases.
Evans the lawyer sees in all of this liability galore.
“Greater marijuana accessibility, resulting in more use, will lead to increased health risks in all demographic categories across the country,” he says.
You can easily visualize plaintiffs’ lawyers standing before the jury box when you hear Evans declare marijuana “a dangerous product,” one complicit, he says, in addiction, mental illness, violence, crime and DUIs.
His lawyer force — the CIVEL group — sees itself marching to the battlefield of tort litigation under the banners of product liability, medical malpractice and even RICO.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act in its federal and various state versions empowers not only prosecutors to take action.
RICO also enables injured parties to file private civil suits against “enterprises” that have caused harm by their investment or other connections to “racketeering” activities. “Racketeering” is sweepingly defined to include dozens of criminal statutes.
Meanwhile — almost overlooked — marijuana remains, officially, an illegal drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act, despite state legalization.
“Medical marijuana” may be no less vulnerable to litigation than recreational marijuana is.
There is, according to Evans, no federal medical standard of care regarding “medical” marijuana’s prescription or its potential future harm. This is particularly relevant to legal issues of negligence, he adds.
He notes a Federal Drug Administration inter-agency statement declaring that, with a couple of minor and limited exceptions, “no sound scientific studies” have ever “supported medical use of marijuana for treatment in the United States” or “the safety or efficacy of marijuana for general use.”
Berenson, the “Tell Your Children” author, acknowledges that many will smoke weed without ill effect. But as mounting studies make clear, he adds, others — and not just an insignificant few — will not be so lucky.
Nor, he adds, will the public, which bears the social and economic brunt of mentally vulnerable, zonked-out social misfits.
By all means the research casting doubt on marijuana should be given a skeptical going-over. That’s the way of science.
But at a minimum the research deserves attention and serious consideration — especially before rushing to legalize weed on the superficial notion that doing so is hip.
Meanwhile, the dreaded personal-injury lawyers are mustering their troops.