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.
I'm really sorry about this experience. Sounds a lot like what I've heard from so many people about meth and other drugs people widely acknowledge as "hard."
Per my earlier comment, I would caution against drawing too strong a comparison between cannabis and drugs like cocaine, meth, and opioids. I've seen what regular use of all these does to people I care about, up close, and the life outcomes of those that regularly indulge in cannabis is *nothing* like it is with harder drugs. There are problems with abusing any substance, to be sure. You make a lot of salient points your piece, which risk being undermined by treating cannabis as being in the same league as hard drugs. It may be very problematic and bad for some, but compared to something like meth, it is orders of magnitude less destructive.
I’m referring in this piece to high concentration THC products. I understand that in your experience even those products haven’t been comparable to a hard drug, but in many other people’s experiences, some of which I’ve recounted in the article, they have been *exactly* like what are typically seen as hard drugs: addiction, psychosis, suicidality. At least one other similar story has appeared in this very comment thread.
Understood, and it's a valid point. But anybody who's seen first hand what daily meth smoking does to a person vs somebody who takes vape hits of "dab" is almost certainly going to push back hard on any argument stating that there's an equivalence. It is absolutely true that high potency THC is problematic for many people. But it's also true that the magnitude of this problem with THC is orders or magnitude less severe than with a drug like meth. In other words, there are problems with both, but the problems are very different in scope, even if the outcomes seem to overlap.
Thanks, I appreciate your perspective. I don't know that I specifically equated high concentration THC with meth anywhere in the piece other than stating that they're both hard drugs, and making some empirical comparisons that I stand by (such as the conversion rate to schizophrenia being higher for THC than for meth). That doesn't make the problems associated with them identical, and I know very well they're not, as what I've principally reported on before this piece is the addiction crisis of meth and fentanyl. I report on the Tenderloin regularly, so I'm very much aware of what that addiction crisis looks like, and aware that the people camped out in tents and hunched over half conscious are not on THC. But while they're not identical, what I've heard from parents and from ER doctors etc. has convinced me that today's high potency THC is very much more in the ballpark of the meth and fentanyl crisis than it is that of the bong rips of my high school days. When I was young, growing up in Berkeley where weed was everywhere, nobody was going psycho or killing themselves over their pot habits. Now that very much is the case.
The article is literally titled weed is the new OxyContin. How is that not direct comparison? 70k people are now dying from opioid overdoses a year. How many cannabis overdoses? Your “empirical comparisons” are disingenuous at best.
The difference, which I believe Leighton is trying to draw attention to in this piece, is that nobody is normalizing meth use as “medical” or “medicinal” or to be used in the treatment of depression or anxiety. Marijuana use has been normalized and is therefore becoming much more widespread, so by statistical probability alone, much more likely to target those that are vulnerable to experiencing severe effects like psychosis.
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.
The super high THC products should probably be regulated more strictly, similar to how you can't just walk into a liquor store and buy 98% pure ethanol. My fellow Gen-X'ers out there will probably remember "Everclear", which was basically the highest proof grain alcohol you could buy, and it was garbage. Respectable liquor stores didn't sell it for obvious reasons. Dispensaries could do the same. But overall, I find the dispensary experience here in the Bay Area to be great. I can find products with micro-dose levels of THC, the quality is consistent, and there is plenty of variety. I'll take that over having to meet a "friend of a friend" at a flat in the lower Haight to buy an ounce of flower that was clearly high quality but of unknown provenance.
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.
Well, the Christian in me has to point out that when the New Testament condemns 'sorcery', the actual Greek word is 'pharmakos', which has meanings related both to drugs and a human sacrifice. We should not ignore--I believe--that psychoactive substances may have harmful effects that go beyond the physical realm.
Except, of course, that neither cannabis nor COVID has been conclusively proven to cause permanent brain/cognitive damage in a significant percentage of the population, let alone enough to threaten the survival of the species.
But I swear, if political polarities were reversed, I guarantee you that the Republicans and some DINOs would still keep everyone under the supposedly magic age of 25 under some flavor of lockdown to this day and beyond, maybe even forever, to protect their allegedly fragile brains from the virus, lol.
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.
I'm sorry for those experiences, they sound awful. I'm the same way — marijuana has never done anything for me but make me paranoid, so I naturally stayed away. Now I understand that my reaction to it means that if I had just forged on ahead and kept using it routinely, at least with today's products, I would've been putting myself at risk for a psychotic break and then, perhaps, chronic schizophrenia or BPD. Clearly, you're in the same boat.
You can't get BPD from a drug. Personality disorders are developed early in life when attachment and personality are forming and cannot develop in adulthood. BPD in particular should just be relabeled a trauma PD since while the DSM says it can develop in early life absent trauma, ask any clinician that treats it and they will say they have never seen that occur "in the wild".
This just is not true, Jennifer. I do research on BPD, and there are plenty of people who develop BPD patterns without experiencing trauma. And sometimes it does develop in adulthood. I doubt BPD would be caused by marijuana use, so I am with you on that point, however!
BPD patterns are in a lot of people, agreed! A full blown BPD diagnosis is rare and develops in childhood. PTSD and complex trauma can develop later in life and certainly looks a lot like BPD at times. Here's an interesting video on the crossover:
I totally agree that if you are BPD and are in therapy and managing it I'm sure taking a psychotic substance makes it worse! It just can't cause it, while I am pretty sure if you damage your brain enough you can develop schizophrenia or bipolar. Personality disorders just have a different etiology than mood or psychotic disorders.
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.
One especially good example of that is CBD. CBD actually partially counteracts the psychoactive effects of THC, so when you smoke weed, it mitigates the drug’s effect on you. The process of creating THC concentrates strips the CBD entirely out of the end product.
Really? That’s interesting. It seems like that happens with a lot of things too. Like taking vitamins is good but somehow plants that are high in those vitamins contain other things (fiber, minerals, whatever) that improve absorption, etc. so vitamins might not work as well. Then people split it apart and things don’t work the same.
Thanks again for the article. I really appreciate your writing.
Indeed. That reminds me of Dr. James W. Prescott's contrasting the differences between cultures that use "botanical drugs" versus "distilled drugs". Spoiler alert: the latter tend to be worse overall.
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?
For starters it should tell the truth, the whole truth. Unfortunately its mostly the purveyors / marketers that are spinning sweet tales of 'medicine' and not enough honest reporting. Too much alcohol is harmful, so is too much THC.
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.
Over 10-15% is basically a hard drug, according to the doctors and researchers I spoke to. It should really be capped at that, but with all the corporate money that's in the product now, we'll be very fortunate if it ever gets capped at even 50%.
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.
I'm really sorry about this experience. Sounds a lot like what I've heard from so many people about meth and other drugs people widely acknowledge as "hard."
Per my earlier comment, I would caution against drawing too strong a comparison between cannabis and drugs like cocaine, meth, and opioids. I've seen what regular use of all these does to people I care about, up close, and the life outcomes of those that regularly indulge in cannabis is *nothing* like it is with harder drugs. There are problems with abusing any substance, to be sure. You make a lot of salient points your piece, which risk being undermined by treating cannabis as being in the same league as hard drugs. It may be very problematic and bad for some, but compared to something like meth, it is orders of magnitude less destructive.
I’m referring in this piece to high concentration THC products. I understand that in your experience even those products haven’t been comparable to a hard drug, but in many other people’s experiences, some of which I’ve recounted in the article, they have been *exactly* like what are typically seen as hard drugs: addiction, psychosis, suicidality. At least one other similar story has appeared in this very comment thread.
Understood, and it's a valid point. But anybody who's seen first hand what daily meth smoking does to a person vs somebody who takes vape hits of "dab" is almost certainly going to push back hard on any argument stating that there's an equivalence. It is absolutely true that high potency THC is problematic for many people. But it's also true that the magnitude of this problem with THC is orders or magnitude less severe than with a drug like meth. In other words, there are problems with both, but the problems are very different in scope, even if the outcomes seem to overlap.
Thanks, I appreciate your perspective. I don't know that I specifically equated high concentration THC with meth anywhere in the piece other than stating that they're both hard drugs, and making some empirical comparisons that I stand by (such as the conversion rate to schizophrenia being higher for THC than for meth). That doesn't make the problems associated with them identical, and I know very well they're not, as what I've principally reported on before this piece is the addiction crisis of meth and fentanyl. I report on the Tenderloin regularly, so I'm very much aware of what that addiction crisis looks like, and aware that the people camped out in tents and hunched over half conscious are not on THC. But while they're not identical, what I've heard from parents and from ER doctors etc. has convinced me that today's high potency THC is very much more in the ballpark of the meth and fentanyl crisis than it is that of the bong rips of my high school days. When I was young, growing up in Berkeley where weed was everywhere, nobody was going psycho or killing themselves over their pot habits. Now that very much is the case.
The article is literally titled weed is the new OxyContin. How is that not direct comparison? 70k people are now dying from opioid overdoses a year. How many cannabis overdoses? Your “empirical comparisons” are disingenuous at best.
The difference, which I believe Leighton is trying to draw attention to in this piece, is that nobody is normalizing meth use as “medical” or “medicinal” or to be used in the treatment of depression or anxiety. Marijuana use has been normalized and is therefore becoming much more widespread, so by statistical probability alone, much more likely to target those that are vulnerable to experiencing severe effects like psychosis.
Indeed, we ought not to generalize from horrible but rare anecdotes.
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.
The super high THC products should probably be regulated more strictly, similar to how you can't just walk into a liquor store and buy 98% pure ethanol. My fellow Gen-X'ers out there will probably remember "Everclear", which was basically the highest proof grain alcohol you could buy, and it was garbage. Respectable liquor stores didn't sell it for obvious reasons. Dispensaries could do the same. But overall, I find the dispensary experience here in the Bay Area to be great. I can find products with micro-dose levels of THC, the quality is consistent, and there is plenty of variety. I'll take that over having to meet a "friend of a friend" at a flat in the lower Haight to buy an ounce of flower that was clearly high quality but of unknown provenance.
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.
Really is an idol. Never wrote a piece that generated so much hate.
Well, the Christian in me has to point out that when the New Testament condemns 'sorcery', the actual Greek word is 'pharmakos', which has meanings related both to drugs and a human sacrifice. We should not ignore--I believe--that psychoactive substances may have harmful effects that go beyond the physical realm.
Do you feel the same way about Big Pharma's concoctions? Including certain novel experimental gene therapies that self-identify as "vaccines" perhaps?
Except, of course, that neither cannabis nor COVID has been conclusively proven to cause permanent brain/cognitive damage in a significant percentage of the population, let alone enough to threaten the survival of the species.
But I swear, if political polarities were reversed, I guarantee you that the Republicans and some DINOs would still keep everyone under the supposedly magic age of 25 under some flavor of lockdown to this day and beyond, maybe even forever, to protect their allegedly fragile brains from the virus, lol.
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.
I'm sorry for those experiences, they sound awful. I'm the same way — marijuana has never done anything for me but make me paranoid, so I naturally stayed away. Now I understand that my reaction to it means that if I had just forged on ahead and kept using it routinely, at least with today's products, I would've been putting myself at risk for a psychotic break and then, perhaps, chronic schizophrenia or BPD. Clearly, you're in the same boat.
You can't get BPD from a drug. Personality disorders are developed early in life when attachment and personality are forming and cannot develop in adulthood. BPD in particular should just be relabeled a trauma PD since while the DSM says it can develop in early life absent trauma, ask any clinician that treats it and they will say they have never seen that occur "in the wild".
You can't get it from a drug, but drug use can trigger a genetic predisposition.
Oh sorry, my fault — I meant bipolar disorder, but BPD is Borderline Personality Disorder. Misspoke.
Just my opinion only, I think marijuana brings out and exacerbates disorders that might have not come to the surface or remained controllable.
This just is not true, Jennifer. I do research on BPD, and there are plenty of people who develop BPD patterns without experiencing trauma. And sometimes it does develop in adulthood. I doubt BPD would be caused by marijuana use, so I am with you on that point, however!
I meant bipolar not borderline, this was my mistake.
BPD patterns are in a lot of people, agreed! A full blown BPD diagnosis is rare and develops in childhood. PTSD and complex trauma can develop later in life and certainly looks a lot like BPD at times. Here's an interesting video on the crossover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hIGaxGU13w
I totally agree that if you are BPD and are in therapy and managing it I'm sure taking a psychotic substance makes it worse! It just can't cause it, while I am pretty sure if you damage your brain enough you can develop schizophrenia or bipolar. Personality disorders just have a different etiology than mood or psychotic disorders.
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.
One especially good example of that is CBD. CBD actually partially counteracts the psychoactive effects of THC, so when you smoke weed, it mitigates the drug’s effect on you. The process of creating THC concentrates strips the CBD entirely out of the end product.
Really? That’s interesting. It seems like that happens with a lot of things too. Like taking vitamins is good but somehow plants that are high in those vitamins contain other things (fiber, minerals, whatever) that improve absorption, etc. so vitamins might not work as well. Then people split it apart and things don’t work the same.
Thanks again for the article. I really appreciate your writing.
I certainly agree with that. I do wish you had mentioned that nuance in your article.
Indeed. That reminds me of Dr. James W. Prescott's contrasting the differences between cultures that use "botanical drugs" versus "distilled drugs". Spoiler alert: the latter tend to be worse overall.
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?
For starters it should tell the truth, the whole truth. Unfortunately its mostly the purveyors / marketers that are spinning sweet tales of 'medicine' and not enough honest reporting. Too much alcohol is harmful, so is too much THC.
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.
Over 10-15% is basically a hard drug, according to the doctors and researchers I spoke to. It should really be capped at that, but with all the corporate money that's in the product now, we'll be very fortunate if it ever gets capped at even 50%.
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.