Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about disturbing new evidence of the harmful effect of cannabis.
Advocates of cannabis legalization have used two major arguments to persuade the public in the past few decades. Increasingly, both seem to be completely specious.
The first is that cannabis has medicinal benefits. This argument was widely deployed during the AIDS epidemic, with advocates telling the public that cannabis would help the terminally ill to eat when they seemed to be wasting away. Who could be so heartless as to oppose cannabis use for this population? Most of the states that legalized cannabis began with allowances for medical use.
Over time, the supposed health benefits have expanded to include treatment for anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. It is astonishing to hear how many teenagers (and their parents) were fooled into believing that weed was going to cure their problems. But in April, The Lancet published a meta-analysis concluding that there is no evidence of cannabis’s effectiveness at treating any of these psychiatric conditions.
And last week, consumers in 12 states filed a class-action lawsuit against three cannabis companies for claims that their product could help with mental health, pain and other disorders while knowing that the evidence didn’t support that.
The second important myth proffered by cannabis advocates is that legalizing the drug would improve the lives of African Americans. The narrative was that Black people were disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs and that decriminalizing cannabis would mean fewer Black people would be incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. There were several problems with this argument. First, our prisons are not filled with people who were locked up for getting caught with a dime bag. They are filled with people who have committed violent offenses and unfortunately there are racial disparities in those crimes.
Just as cannabis hasn’t been any kind of panacea for those seeking relief from physical or psychiatric ailments, it also hasn’t brought much in the way of “social justice” for the supposed beneficiaries of legalization.
