The evolving image of pot
A strong emotional current helps medical marijuana flourish as an industry
DENVER – Twenty years after California legalized it for sick people, medical marijuana has become a billion-dollar-a-year business so cloaked in emotion that it would be virtually impossible to dismantle.
Without any real national discussion, most Americans live where it’s possible to get pot for pain, nausea or other ailments. Thirty states permit some form of medical cannabis use, and several more are poised to approve it this fall — a sign this industry has altered public opinion among conservatives and liberals.
“I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat — I don’t care who you are,” said Kevin Murphy, CEO of Acreage Holdings, a medical marijuana firm with operations in 11 states. “If you have a brother dying of cancer and this is the only thing that brings him comfort … you are an advocate.”
Millions of Americans look to marijuana to relieve pain, improve their appetite and ease the side effects of chemotherapy. Others swear by it for helping with posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety
or seizures. Millions use it just to sleep better.
Although emotions helped drive legalization, medical marijuana simultaneously became a big business. As many as 135,000 people work in the medical pot business across the country, generating $1.8 billion in income taxes and at least $300 million in state sales taxes last year, said Matt Karnes of GreenWave Advisors.
Marijuana workers buy and rent property, spending their salaries — and paying a significantly higher tax rate than traditional workers, thanks to an IRS ruling originally designed to fight drug traffickers.
Congress has taken only tentative steps to recognize the industry’s popularity and power, and the executive branch has not acknowledged that millions of Americans regularly consume marijuana in lieu of prescription medicines.
In March, lawmakers barred the federal government from interfering with any state-regulated medical marijuana system, but there has been no movement on plans in Congress to lower marijuana’s classification as a Schedule 1 drug.
“As an industry, we have the opportunity to really get it right,” said Jen Lujan of California-based medical marijuana company Eaze. Lujan founded Weed for Good, which connects low-income sick people with medical-grade cannabis. “We have the opportunity to destigmatize it, especially on the social impact side.”
Marijuana’s use cuts across social and economic backgrounds. About 24 million Americans ages 12 and older reported using cannabis in the past 30 days, according to a study in 2016 by the Department of Health and Human Services. Of those, 90% said their primary use was recreational, 10% said it was only for medical reasons, and 36% said they used it for both.
“They effectively changed the face of marijuana from a loser in a basement to your sick grandmother. It was, frankly, a brilliant PR move.” Kevin Sabet Smart Approaches to Marijuana
Five states, including Utah, are considering whether to permit medical marijuana this fall. In announcing his opposition to granting broad access to medical marijuana in Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert said he worried that allowing medical pot “would potentially open the door to recreational use.”
Every state that has legalized recreational pot started out permitting only medical cannabis, then expanded once people got comfortable. It’s a pattern repeated from Colorado to California and from Maine to Nevada.
It’s a strategy not lost on Kevin Sabet, who runs Smart Approaches to Marijuana. Sabet is a former senior adviser to the Office of National Drug Control Policy and a fierce critic of what he has dubbed “Big Marijuana.”
“They effectively changed the face of marijuana from a loser in a basement to your sick grandmother,” Sabet said. “It was, frankly, a brilliant PR move.”
Groups such as Sabet’s worry the nation has moved too quickly when it comes to permitting widespread marijuana use, especially when it’s wrapped in the cloak of “medicine,” which is routinely how medical marijuana advocates describe what they sell.
Those products haven’t gone through the same federal testing as prescription medicine or even over-the-counter drugs such as Advil.
In most cases, users need only a doctors’ note saying cannabis would help them with the pain of cancer or nausea, leaving it up to the user and whoever sells the cannabis to decide how much to consume.
Under federal law, doctors cannot di- rectly prescribe marijuana because it’s still illegal, although they can prescribe marinol, a synthetic version of THC that users say is far less effective and much more expensive than real cannabis.
A large reason for the lack of studies is the heavy restrictions that come with being classified a Schedule 1 drug. That list includes heroin but not oxycodone or other opiates, which medical marijuana advocates point out are far more dangerous to users.
A small number of medically accepted studies has shown marijuana appears to be an effective treatment for chronic pain, nausea and symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warned of dangers from marijuana use: an increased risk of car crashes, lower birth weight babies and problems with memory and attention. It found strong connections between heavy cannabis use and the development of schizophrenia and other psychoses.
That’s enough to give Deni Carise pause. An addiction expert and chief scientific officer at Recovery Centers of America, Carise has no significant objection to medical marijuana use.
She does object to the industry that sprung up around pot, an industry filled with people who evangelize about the plant’s benefits without any solid scientific backing. “The reality is that whenever something becomes cheaper and more available, more people are going to use it,” she said.
Carise said it’s highly unlikely the Food and Drug Administration would ever approve smoked marijuana for personal use, given the experience with tobacco, which was once also recommended for a variety of ailments, including stutters and breathing difficulty.
Medical marijuana advocates, unsurprisingly, reject any comparisons to the tobacco industry. Though smoking cannabis is the most obvious way to consume it, entrepreneurs unfettered by government regulation figured out how to infuse it into foods and drinks, turn it into nanoparticles or extract it into oils and tinctures.