Colorado's experiment could all go terribly wrong. But baked pundits serving up half-baked anecdotes shed little light
By T.N. | LOS ANGELES
IS COLORADO'S bold experiment with marijuana legalisation going wrong? It certainly went a little hazy for Maureen Dowd, a columnist whose opinions have enlivened the pages of the New York Times for nearly 20 years now. Back in January Ms Dowd found herself holed up in her room at the Denver Four Seasons, with only a marijuana-infused "caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar" for company. Visiting Colorado to report on its "social revolution", Ms Dowd, laudably committed to the cause of immersive journalism, had decided to get high. She then proceeded to make what some readers will recognise as a classic schoolboy error.
"I nibbled off the end," she writes, "and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more... What could go wrong with a bite or two?" The question, of course, answers itself, and sure enough Ms Dowd soon finds herself "curled up in a hallucinatory state" for hours. Like an extra from a Cheech and Chong movie, she becomes convinced that she has died without anyone telling her. (The inevitable parody Twitter account is now in business.)
Marijuana in edible form, never a major concern of legalisation advocates, is emerging as a problem. Smokers, who receive instant psychoactive feedback from their ingestion, can calibrate accordingly, but the effects of eating can take an hour or more to kick in, tempting the uninitiated to take another bite (a temptation enhanced by the fact that edibles often come as brownies or chocolate bars). Worse, novices like Ms Dowd often turn to edibles because they seem friendlier than joints, when the opposite is often true. Others, it turns out, have made similar mistakes or worse, including a Denver man who appears to have shot his wife dead after eating some pot-infused Karma Kandy. There are some anecdotal reports of children admitted to hospital after consuming marijuana.
Teething troubles or something more ominous? The answer, five months in, is that it is far too early to tell. The data that one needs to arrive at a proper assessment of Colorado's policy, including on schoolchildren found in possession of marijuana and on stoned driving (a concern for many), are a good way off. Vox, a data-driven news website, makes a valiant attempt to unearth numbers suggesting that all is well so far, but sceptics are unlikely to be convinced—it is far from clear, for example, that totting up marijuana-related visits to hospital as a percentage of all unique hospital visits is an appropriate metric*.
Legalisation does present some thorny problems. Just as teenagers find ways to get their hands on booze, some children who previously would have not had access to marijuana will now get it, and there is good evidence that it can damage adolescent brain development. Some people who would not previously have consumed it will do so. Some of them may develop unhealthy dependencies (Ms Dowd, one suspects, will not be among them).
There are plenty of policy knots to untangle. How to set taxes at a level low enough to cripple the black market but high enough to discourage consumption? How strict should rules on marketing and packaging be? Should cities and counties have the right to opt out from legalisation? Should sellers be forced to grow their own supply, or should they be prohibited from doing so? How should regulations for the retail industry vary from the older medical one? For what it's worth, Colorado's officials, as far as I can tell from conversations with them and some policy wonks, appear to have done as diligent a job in thinking about these issues as anyone could have wished. Many other states are grappling with their own drug laws; they are in Colorado's debt.
In trying to work out whether Colorado has got it right or not, there is a risk in asking the wrong question. Marijuana legalisation involves complicated trade-offs and counterfactuals. Counting stoned drivers won't do; before legalisation, perhaps some of them would have driven drunk, and caused more destruction. Measuring total marijuana consumption isn't enough; how would those smokers (or eaters) otherwise have spent their time? (If they turn out to be drinking less, that will be good news.) And do not forget all the lives previously ruined by arrests for marijuana possession; the absence of such human miseries under a legal regime will be easily forgotten but should weigh heavily in its assessment.
Beyond crime and public health, the danger for Colorado is that it attracts the unwanted attention of the Department of Justice. Marijuana is still illegal under federal law. The DoJ has given Colorado (and Washington state, which has also legalised it but has yet to licence retail outlets) a tentative green light, but says it will come down hard on any violation of several "enforcement priorities", such as keeping marijuana away from kids. If Colorado gets that wrong, it could yet find itself the target of the feds' wrath (as manyotherstates have).
Beyond all that, should the new ability of lots of competent adults to take part in a pleasurable activity that was previously illegal not count in the sum of human happiness? Different people will answer such questions in different ways. Some people like getting stoned and harm no one in their habit.
The march of marijuana across America is sometimes seen as inevitable, rather like gay marriage; but unlike that issue, which involves no complicated policy considerations beyond the odd tweak to the tax code, pot legalisation is just the beginning of a long journey with an unclear destination. It could yet go wrong. But baked pundits serving up half-baked anecdotes shed little light.
*This originally implied that totting up hospital visits was not an appropriate measure, when really our problem is with efforts that simply calculate marijuana-related hospital visits as a percentage of all unique visits. Apologies for the misrepresentation.
