This is a really important piece, Leighton. I hope you'll keep reporting on this story.
As someone who lives in LA, I've definitely noticed not just a huge increase in the number of homeless people on the streets, but also a substantive change in the *kind* of homelessness that's out there. I see people experiencing full psychotic episodes on a daily basis -- to an extent I never saw even at the height of the homeless crisis in NY in the late 80s. It really resembles the crack epidemic.
Some of this has already been attributed to fentanyl and the "new" meth. But it may also be attributed in part to the legalization of weed in CA several years ago and the concomitant rise of dispensaries selling engineered THC products.
While weed enthusiasts are quick to claim "the war on drugs didn't work" -- and they're right -- we have swung to the other extreme, a kind of hands-off libertarianism combined with institutional apathy that Michael Shellenberger has written about.
At some point we're going to need a Scandinavian-type approach to both drugs and alcohol. These items should be decriminalized, but there should be strict controls on their potency and how they're advertised... and they should be heavily taxed to pay for treatment programs. In order for that to happen, the nature of the discourse around marijuana is going to have to change.
Here’s what I know from my own experience: the idea that it’s not addictive cannot be true - I lived with my boyfriend for two years who smoked regularly (his brother grew it, and was his source), and he used it to deal with his combat ptsd and anxiety, yet he was often paranoid and physically abusive. In addition he stole my iPod to pawn for money to buy pot (his brother wasn’t going to just give it to him) and worse, when he was out of money and needed more he pushed me up against the wall in a chokehold when I told him I would use my last $40 to give to him for that. I’m not a hundred percent sure but think he also stole child support money from my purse. He pawned his own guitar, and was living at his mothers house (at age 40) when we met. This does not sound like the choices or behavior of someone who’s not addicted. For a long time I would be triggered simply by the smell of it. I lived in Oregon and found that there were very few who would tolerate my account as proof that maybe the narrative deserved to be questioned.
When someone is willing to steal and assault someone they love to get their fix, it’s an addiction.
Sep 1, 2022·edited Sep 1, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse
This lines up with my own personal experience. I'm 38. When I was a freshman in college I smoked a lot of cheap pot, watched dumb TV shows or had philosophical discussions with my roommates, and was otherwise fine. I lived in the south, and the government policy of draconian prohibition seemed totally insane. This helped to shape a lot of my political beliefs, gave me what I consider a healthy amount of skepticism of government authority. I stopped smoking pot after a year or two because I didn't like feeling paranoid.
Now I live on the West Coast. Legal dispensaries are all over the place. Even the weakest brand of gummies I can buy is too much to handle; I'd consume a tiny fragment and still get way too high. I did this a few times and decided it wasn't for me. Too intense. With alcohol it's a lot easier to gauge how messed up you are going to get, but with modern edibles it seems incredibly easy to overdo it.
I don't think that returning to the old-school drug war is the answer, but you are correct to draw some attention here. The legal cannabis world is really the Wild West at this point. Sometimes I think that decriminalization would have been better than legalization, because then you can keep profit-seeking corporations away. But now that the cat is out of the bag, we probably need some strict limits on potency to get weed products closer to the mostly harmless level we had 20 years ago.
I am somewhat a casual user of MJ, and I would not touch concentrates with a 10-foot pole. Cartridges and dabs are so powerful; I cannot imagine what they can do to a child’s developing brain. I got a medical card many years ago (at least in CA, cards expire in a year; those doctors gotta make money!) when I was having back spasms. I wanted to buy a cream with THC and other non fun products (suppositories) to help with the pain, because I did not want opioids or muscle relaxants. Over the years I have noticed that dispensaries have moved away from products that can only be used for medical purposes (creams and suppositories) to recreational products - oils, drinks, and edibles - many of which now come with super high concentrations of THC (products designed to make you pass out). Your article is well taken. A crisis is afoot…I don’t know what we should do about legalization and regulation, but being honest about the products that are being sold and moving away from the rhetoric of “medicine” seems like a good idea.
Awesome piece. Now you really have attacked the biggest idol of them all: cannabis. IMO some, perhaps many, of the problems SF have are attributable to the fact that many of our leaders are heavy users of marijuana. It's amazing how credulous people are about cannabis and the hucksters selling it. And it's appalling it's so easy for younger people to get it, as the effects on the brain are permanent in adolescents. A future where a plurality of adults have some degree of permanent cognitive damage from cannabis, covid, or both, is going to make our survival as a species even more challenging.
I've only taken cannabis twice in my life, both times as edibles since the idea of smoking anything doesn't appeal to me at all. The first time, in 2003, I took way too much (edibles take a long time to take effect), had a psychotic break and ended up in the emergency room. The second time, in 2016, I was mindful not to take too much, and still had a panic attack. I felt like I was on the verge of psychosis, but ultimately didn't cross the line. It was still a very unpleasant feeling. The moral of the story, I guess, is that cannabis just isn't something that I should be taking.
Anyway, good journalistic effort on Leighton's part.
Part of the problem here is that formerly, back when Mary Jane was typically natural and grown and smoked as a plant with very low THC, the Right kinda went overboard and oversold the dangers. "Refer Madness" may apply to the new industrialized marijuana, but was laughable as a description of the effects of what was available at the time. Now, after crying wolf, it's going to be difficult to be taken seriously.
It seems that refinement is a common way of taking something good and using it to get rich and hurt people. Corn is good so refine it, sell it cheap, and everyone gets diabetes. Chew on a coca plant in Peru to help with the altitude, good. Refine it, sell it, and yay cocaine. Same with caffeine. You can only get so much caffeine out of a coffee bean but you can put as much as you want in a Monster.
I think nature has a natural way of limiting the concentration of the chemicals that can help people get better. It seems like when we Henry Ford it that stuff starts to go sideways.
When I retired four years ago at age 63, I decided to grow weed in my home, both because I thought this would be a fun and interesting hobby and also because I enjoyed imbibing occasionally when I was in college and grad school. I live in a non-legal state with some of the most draconian anti-cannabis laws in the country, so I have to be very discreet about this. My efforts have yielded some fairly potent flower (I’m guessing the THC content is between 18-21 percent), and I enjoy vaping it (three or four hits is plenty) along with a beer most evenings. But I never do this before 8 pm, I only do it in my home, and I don’t leave the house afterward. I can honestly say that I’ve suffered no discernible negative consequences from this. To the contrary, my weed’s effects are consistently euphoric and very pleasurable.
That said, I have no reason to doubt any of Leighton’s reporting here. I’ve never understood the idea that weed can be “medicine,” I’m baffled by dabs, oils, cartridges, edibles, etc., can’t imagine why anyone would want to be stoned all day, and definitely think it should be off-limits to teenagers.
Leighton draws valid parallels between modern cannabis and opioids, but I think the best analogy may be to legalized gambling. Like marijuana, gambling was largely illegal in the U.S. until fairly recently, and like marijuana there are verifiable cases of people who became addicted and whose lives were ruined as a result. Critics claimed that casinos’ business model depended on a large cohort of “problem gamblers” whose addiction the gaming industry actively facilitated, similar to the claims Leighton makes about the commercial cannabis industry. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that most people who visit casinos or bet on sports are able to do so responsibly and with no ill effects. I’d argue that marijuana is no different.
Ultimately we’re confronted with a familiar conundrum: How should a free society regulate an activity that most participants enjoy without negative consequences, knowing that a small but not insignificant subset will experience disastrous outcomes?
I’m 63. I first smoked pot when I was a freshman in high school. In my social circle we all smoked it on weekends. I stopped smoking it in my twenties when I became an adult. Recently I was diagnosed with neuropathy and was prescribed gabapentin to alleviate the nerve pain and restless leg syndrome which prevented me from sleeping comfortably. That was somewhat helpful but I hated the side effects. It was suggested to me by a friend to try THC as an alternative. I researched it extensively and decided to try vaping 10% THC content oil. I use the Indica strain. It’s had an amazing affect. I take on puff at bedtime. Sleep like a baby and I have stopped my gabapentin.
However, I tried a Sativa strain at 45% strength while in Colorado and the result was horrific. Paranoia, felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Hyper.
I lived in NYC in the 80’s and had tried cocaine but hated it. All my friends were frequent users. It was cool and the common consensus in the street was that it wasn’t addictive. Hah. I buried three friends whose organs failed after ten years of weekend abuse. These were upper middle class and wealthy professionals. I remember laying in bed at 5am grinding my teeth desperate to fall asleep but not being able to. I had the same experience with this high potency THC - and that was half the potency of what Leighton has reported people are using daily. OMG. I can’t imagine how they can function. It must be like doing acid.
I say limit the potency to something manageable. Don’t know what that might be, but for me that 10% strength is plenty. Similar to what pot was like in the 70’s.
Yeah tons of coffee drinkers being brought to ERs on 5150s. So many caffeine addicts being driven to suicide by their psychoses. Great point. How did I not think of that.
I have generally supported the legalization of marijuana, but will not argue there can still be issues with addiction, and furthermore, that some in the industry are going to focus on keeping people addicted to products so they can make more money. Marijuana and THC thus need to be treated the same as any other substance that can be addictive -- we need to make sure people understand what these substances are, without allowing politics to get in the way.
That brings me to this: We are letting too many of our institutions succumb to politics when it comes to medical issues and science. We are already seeing this happen with COVID-19, in which the FDA is, more or less, rubber stamping approval of the vaccines, whether it's for children, for infants, another booster, etc. The FDA is not looking at evidence which shows whether or not the vaccine provides a clear benefit for a certain group, nor asking about what tests were utilized to determine whether or not another booster provides a clear benefit. It's less about whether something has a clear benefit and more about whether it will advance somebody's political agenda.
So it is with marijuana and the issues that Leighton covered in his piece. We will have the types who will say "this is why marijuana should be banned" while shrugging their shoulders at alcohol, or the types who say "just let people make their own decisions" when people often get bad advice or companies give misleading information, or the types who put blind trust in the FDA or other agencies when they are getting heavily influenced by political agendas.
When it comes to science and medicine, we need to get the politics out and we need to stop putting profit ahead of everything else. The best way to make decisions about science and medicine is to look at all the evidence available and do a risk versus benefit analysis, while making sure people have enough information to make an informed decision. And regarding profit, it is possible to recognize that drug companies need to make a profit to stay in business, but that doesn't mean we just make profit about "more, more, more" while ignoring legitimate concerns about what is sold to the public.
We can debate what policies allow that to happen, but we can't succumb to "but my politics" or "profit above all."
Some of the comments object to the postulate that marijuana, in its current iteration, can be as harmful as “hard” drugs, (i.e. meth, opiates). They argue that the latter have a greater number of predictable worse outcomes (addiction, mental illness) than cannabis. One important distinction that is being ignored, is that at this time, nobody is promoting meth or cocaine as “medicinal” and “safe” and the opioid epidemic has alerted people to the harms from opiates, so physicians are much more cautious in prescribing them. Nobody believes these are harmless and they are not being prescribed or “recommended” to treat anxiety and depression. By promoting cannabis as harmless and medicinal, a greater number of users are being exposed to it, which statistically speaking, means a greater number of those vulnerable to bad outcomes (addiction, mental illness) will experience them, and often remain in denial due to the normalization and promotion of the drug.
The data, especially on THC addiction and (violent) crime statistics related to THC use, is rather too inconvenient for the THC lobby and its many boosters. Thanks for writing this. Too many lives are being ruined by these addiction merchants. It is absolutely already an epidemic.
This is a really important piece, Leighton. I hope you'll keep reporting on this story.
As someone who lives in LA, I've definitely noticed not just a huge increase in the number of homeless people on the streets, but also a substantive change in the *kind* of homelessness that's out there. I see people experiencing full psychotic episodes on a daily basis -- to an extent I never saw even at the height of the homeless crisis in NY in the late 80s. It really resembles the crack epidemic.
Some of this has already been attributed to fentanyl and the "new" meth. But it may also be attributed in part to the legalization of weed in CA several years ago and the concomitant rise of dispensaries selling engineered THC products.
While weed enthusiasts are quick to claim "the war on drugs didn't work" -- and they're right -- we have swung to the other extreme, a kind of hands-off libertarianism combined with institutional apathy that Michael Shellenberger has written about.
At some point we're going to need a Scandinavian-type approach to both drugs and alcohol. These items should be decriminalized, but there should be strict controls on their potency and how they're advertised... and they should be heavily taxed to pay for treatment programs. In order for that to happen, the nature of the discourse around marijuana is going to have to change.
Here’s what I know from my own experience: the idea that it’s not addictive cannot be true - I lived with my boyfriend for two years who smoked regularly (his brother grew it, and was his source), and he used it to deal with his combat ptsd and anxiety, yet he was often paranoid and physically abusive. In addition he stole my iPod to pawn for money to buy pot (his brother wasn’t going to just give it to him) and worse, when he was out of money and needed more he pushed me up against the wall in a chokehold when I told him I would use my last $40 to give to him for that. I’m not a hundred percent sure but think he also stole child support money from my purse. He pawned his own guitar, and was living at his mothers house (at age 40) when we met. This does not sound like the choices or behavior of someone who’s not addicted. For a long time I would be triggered simply by the smell of it. I lived in Oregon and found that there were very few who would tolerate my account as proof that maybe the narrative deserved to be questioned.
When someone is willing to steal and assault someone they love to get their fix, it’s an addiction.
This lines up with my own personal experience. I'm 38. When I was a freshman in college I smoked a lot of cheap pot, watched dumb TV shows or had philosophical discussions with my roommates, and was otherwise fine. I lived in the south, and the government policy of draconian prohibition seemed totally insane. This helped to shape a lot of my political beliefs, gave me what I consider a healthy amount of skepticism of government authority. I stopped smoking pot after a year or two because I didn't like feeling paranoid.
Now I live on the West Coast. Legal dispensaries are all over the place. Even the weakest brand of gummies I can buy is too much to handle; I'd consume a tiny fragment and still get way too high. I did this a few times and decided it wasn't for me. Too intense. With alcohol it's a lot easier to gauge how messed up you are going to get, but with modern edibles it seems incredibly easy to overdo it.
I don't think that returning to the old-school drug war is the answer, but you are correct to draw some attention here. The legal cannabis world is really the Wild West at this point. Sometimes I think that decriminalization would have been better than legalization, because then you can keep profit-seeking corporations away. But now that the cat is out of the bag, we probably need some strict limits on potency to get weed products closer to the mostly harmless level we had 20 years ago.
I am somewhat a casual user of MJ, and I would not touch concentrates with a 10-foot pole. Cartridges and dabs are so powerful; I cannot imagine what they can do to a child’s developing brain. I got a medical card many years ago (at least in CA, cards expire in a year; those doctors gotta make money!) when I was having back spasms. I wanted to buy a cream with THC and other non fun products (suppositories) to help with the pain, because I did not want opioids or muscle relaxants. Over the years I have noticed that dispensaries have moved away from products that can only be used for medical purposes (creams and suppositories) to recreational products - oils, drinks, and edibles - many of which now come with super high concentrations of THC (products designed to make you pass out). Your article is well taken. A crisis is afoot…I don’t know what we should do about legalization and regulation, but being honest about the products that are being sold and moving away from the rhetoric of “medicine” seems like a good idea.
Awesome piece. Now you really have attacked the biggest idol of them all: cannabis. IMO some, perhaps many, of the problems SF have are attributable to the fact that many of our leaders are heavy users of marijuana. It's amazing how credulous people are about cannabis and the hucksters selling it. And it's appalling it's so easy for younger people to get it, as the effects on the brain are permanent in adolescents. A future where a plurality of adults have some degree of permanent cognitive damage from cannabis, covid, or both, is going to make our survival as a species even more challenging.
I've only taken cannabis twice in my life, both times as edibles since the idea of smoking anything doesn't appeal to me at all. The first time, in 2003, I took way too much (edibles take a long time to take effect), had a psychotic break and ended up in the emergency room. The second time, in 2016, I was mindful not to take too much, and still had a panic attack. I felt like I was on the verge of psychosis, but ultimately didn't cross the line. It was still a very unpleasant feeling. The moral of the story, I guess, is that cannabis just isn't something that I should be taking.
Anyway, good journalistic effort on Leighton's part.
Part of the problem here is that formerly, back when Mary Jane was typically natural and grown and smoked as a plant with very low THC, the Right kinda went overboard and oversold the dangers. "Refer Madness" may apply to the new industrialized marijuana, but was laughable as a description of the effects of what was available at the time. Now, after crying wolf, it's going to be difficult to be taken seriously.
It seems that refinement is a common way of taking something good and using it to get rich and hurt people. Corn is good so refine it, sell it cheap, and everyone gets diabetes. Chew on a coca plant in Peru to help with the altitude, good. Refine it, sell it, and yay cocaine. Same with caffeine. You can only get so much caffeine out of a coffee bean but you can put as much as you want in a Monster.
I think nature has a natural way of limiting the concentration of the chemicals that can help people get better. It seems like when we Henry Ford it that stuff starts to go sideways.
When I retired four years ago at age 63, I decided to grow weed in my home, both because I thought this would be a fun and interesting hobby and also because I enjoyed imbibing occasionally when I was in college and grad school. I live in a non-legal state with some of the most draconian anti-cannabis laws in the country, so I have to be very discreet about this. My efforts have yielded some fairly potent flower (I’m guessing the THC content is between 18-21 percent), and I enjoy vaping it (three or four hits is plenty) along with a beer most evenings. But I never do this before 8 pm, I only do it in my home, and I don’t leave the house afterward. I can honestly say that I’ve suffered no discernible negative consequences from this. To the contrary, my weed’s effects are consistently euphoric and very pleasurable.
That said, I have no reason to doubt any of Leighton’s reporting here. I’ve never understood the idea that weed can be “medicine,” I’m baffled by dabs, oils, cartridges, edibles, etc., can’t imagine why anyone would want to be stoned all day, and definitely think it should be off-limits to teenagers.
Leighton draws valid parallels between modern cannabis and opioids, but I think the best analogy may be to legalized gambling. Like marijuana, gambling was largely illegal in the U.S. until fairly recently, and like marijuana there are verifiable cases of people who became addicted and whose lives were ruined as a result. Critics claimed that casinos’ business model depended on a large cohort of “problem gamblers” whose addiction the gaming industry actively facilitated, similar to the claims Leighton makes about the commercial cannabis industry. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that most people who visit casinos or bet on sports are able to do so responsibly and with no ill effects. I’d argue that marijuana is no different.
Ultimately we’re confronted with a familiar conundrum: How should a free society regulate an activity that most participants enjoy without negative consequences, knowing that a small but not insignificant subset will experience disastrous outcomes?
I’m 63. I first smoked pot when I was a freshman in high school. In my social circle we all smoked it on weekends. I stopped smoking it in my twenties when I became an adult. Recently I was diagnosed with neuropathy and was prescribed gabapentin to alleviate the nerve pain and restless leg syndrome which prevented me from sleeping comfortably. That was somewhat helpful but I hated the side effects. It was suggested to me by a friend to try THC as an alternative. I researched it extensively and decided to try vaping 10% THC content oil. I use the Indica strain. It’s had an amazing affect. I take on puff at bedtime. Sleep like a baby and I have stopped my gabapentin.
However, I tried a Sativa strain at 45% strength while in Colorado and the result was horrific. Paranoia, felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Hyper.
I lived in NYC in the 80’s and had tried cocaine but hated it. All my friends were frequent users. It was cool and the common consensus in the street was that it wasn’t addictive. Hah. I buried three friends whose organs failed after ten years of weekend abuse. These were upper middle class and wealthy professionals. I remember laying in bed at 5am grinding my teeth desperate to fall asleep but not being able to. I had the same experience with this high potency THC - and that was half the potency of what Leighton has reported people are using daily. OMG. I can’t imagine how they can function. It must be like doing acid.
I say limit the potency to something manageable. Don’t know what that might be, but for me that 10% strength is plenty. Similar to what pot was like in the 70’s.
Doubt it.
Yeah tons of coffee drinkers being brought to ERs on 5150s. So many caffeine addicts being driven to suicide by their psychoses. Great point. How did I not think of that.
This is unsettling and courageous reporting.
I have generally supported the legalization of marijuana, but will not argue there can still be issues with addiction, and furthermore, that some in the industry are going to focus on keeping people addicted to products so they can make more money. Marijuana and THC thus need to be treated the same as any other substance that can be addictive -- we need to make sure people understand what these substances are, without allowing politics to get in the way.
That brings me to this: We are letting too many of our institutions succumb to politics when it comes to medical issues and science. We are already seeing this happen with COVID-19, in which the FDA is, more or less, rubber stamping approval of the vaccines, whether it's for children, for infants, another booster, etc. The FDA is not looking at evidence which shows whether or not the vaccine provides a clear benefit for a certain group, nor asking about what tests were utilized to determine whether or not another booster provides a clear benefit. It's less about whether something has a clear benefit and more about whether it will advance somebody's political agenda.
So it is with marijuana and the issues that Leighton covered in his piece. We will have the types who will say "this is why marijuana should be banned" while shrugging their shoulders at alcohol, or the types who say "just let people make their own decisions" when people often get bad advice or companies give misleading information, or the types who put blind trust in the FDA or other agencies when they are getting heavily influenced by political agendas.
When it comes to science and medicine, we need to get the politics out and we need to stop putting profit ahead of everything else. The best way to make decisions about science and medicine is to look at all the evidence available and do a risk versus benefit analysis, while making sure people have enough information to make an informed decision. And regarding profit, it is possible to recognize that drug companies need to make a profit to stay in business, but that doesn't mean we just make profit about "more, more, more" while ignoring legitimate concerns about what is sold to the public.
We can debate what policies allow that to happen, but we can't succumb to "but my politics" or "profit above all."
Some of the comments object to the postulate that marijuana, in its current iteration, can be as harmful as “hard” drugs, (i.e. meth, opiates). They argue that the latter have a greater number of predictable worse outcomes (addiction, mental illness) than cannabis. One important distinction that is being ignored, is that at this time, nobody is promoting meth or cocaine as “medicinal” and “safe” and the opioid epidemic has alerted people to the harms from opiates, so physicians are much more cautious in prescribing them. Nobody believes these are harmless and they are not being prescribed or “recommended” to treat anxiety and depression. By promoting cannabis as harmless and medicinal, a greater number of users are being exposed to it, which statistically speaking, means a greater number of those vulnerable to bad outcomes (addiction, mental illness) will experience them, and often remain in denial due to the normalization and promotion of the drug.
The data, especially on THC addiction and (violent) crime statistics related to THC use, is rather too inconvenient for the THC lobby and its many boosters. Thanks for writing this. Too many lives are being ruined by these addiction merchants. It is absolutely already an epidemic.