As someone who was a child in the nineteen-sixties, I remember only a few of the many events that shaped my political consciousness. There were the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, of course, and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s speech from the podium of the Democratic National Convention, in 1968, in which he denounced the city’s repulsive mayor, Richard J. Daley: “With George McGovern as President of the United States, we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Ribicoff, from my home state and, like Kennedy, an unshakable opponent of the Vietnam War, was an elegant and restrained politician of a type that has mostly disappeared in America.
Another, slightly more obscure event the following year also made a lasting impression on me: John Sinclair, the poet and political activist, was convicted of possessing two marijuana cigarettes, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison—a sentence that, even then, was unusually severe. Sinclair was hardly Hurricane Carter or the Chicago Seven, nor was he one of the tens of thousands of people sent to Vietnam to die in a war that they shouldn’t have had to fight. But for an absurdly cosseted suburban child like me, learning to roll his first joints, Sinclair’s conviction was an abiding outrage.
I have no regrets about my obsession with the war in Vietnam (even if, at the age of twelve, I was mostly attempting to anger my father). But I am feeling a bit conflicted these days about my long-held view that marijuana was an innocuous treat—far less likely to cause damage than the Martinis our parents guzzled every night.
It’s not that I think marijuana should remain illegal; based on the evidence from our stunningly ruinous war on drugs, smoking pot should be no crime. The Portuguese long ago abolished most penalties for personal drug use, a decision that has proved surprisingly successful in curbing crime and returning addicts to society. (A few years ago, I wrote about Portugal’s approach to drugs for this magazine.) Still, the opposite of inane laws ought not to be blind acceptance.
Today, nearly half of all states allow the medical use of marijuana, and several, led by Colorado, have legalized it completely. In many places, New York being one of them, you can get your pot delivered as easily and quickly as if it were a pizza. I would be happy with that if only I or anyone else knew what it meant to smoke it. But, largely as a result of our government’s refusal to support scientific research on the effects of marijuana, we know stunningly little about what happens when we drop those buds into our fancy new vaporizers. We know even less about the effect of what are called “edibles”—the gummy bears, chocolate truffles, lollipops, brownies, cookies, and other dishes, laced with pot, that are now so easily available to us and, no doubt, to our children.
What do we know when we swallow a marijuana gummy bear? Is it like a hit of good pot? Is it like three? For that matter, is a hit of good pot like it was five decades, or five years ago? Or even five months ago? Nobody seems able to answer those basic questions.
“Right now, people don’t know,” Raphael Mechoulam, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University’s Hadassah Medical School, recently told National Geographic. Mechoulam has done much of the seminal work on the chemical composition of cannabis. “For it to work in the medical world, it has to be quantitative. If you can’t count it, it’s not science,” he said.
At the moment, we certainly can’t count it. What is too much? Should you be allowed to drive after a hit of pot? Or three? Is a hit the equivalent of a glass of wine or half a bottle of vodka? What about when a bit of pot is combined with a beer or two? How does a police officer judge the sobriety of a person who is high? Right now, people mostly just guess.
That’s wildly irresponsible. According to a recent study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, people are now more likely to encounter drugged drivers on the highway than drunk drivers. Hawaii, New Jersey, and Arizona, among other states, have seen increased visits to hospital emergency rooms since approving the use of medical marijuana. Between 2007 and 2012, such visits grew by fifty per cent in Colorado, for example, and that was before the drug was fully legal. Since then, the increase has accelerated.
Interestingly, it is not that people are smoking more, or even that more people are getting high, but that the potency has increased immensely. “The higher the THC content, the stronger the effects on the brain, and the more likely you may end up with toxic reactions—like psychosis,” Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said. (THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.) “Even the occasional user may end up in the E.R. The very significant increase in E.R. visits, it’s due to THC content being much higher now.”
The joints I rolled as a teen-ager contained about one per cent THC by weight. By the early nineteen-eighties, that figure was four per cent. It’s now likely to be closer to twenty per cent. More than that, while occasional smoking seems relatively benign for most adults, there is clear evidence that exposure during adolescence can cause long-term changes in the brain.
I am not suggesting that we all dust off our copies of “Reefer Madness,” or that getting high is inherently wrong—as long as you know how high you are getting and what it is you are smoking. But we don’t. It is a strange country that is filled with people who object to life-saving vaccines, insist on labelling G.M.O.s, protest the use of pesticides that, when used correctly, have not been shown to cause harm, and yet seem ready to smoke whatever a dealer hands them to put in their pipes.
