Why The Wall Street Journal Piece ‘Legal Marijuana’s Disastrous Legacy’ Missed The Mark

As first published on Cultivated.

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Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal — I should say, a newspaper that I admire and many friends work for or have worked for in the past — published an op-ed on cannabis legalization that missed the mark, for many reasons.

The piece claims that legalizing cannabis has been an abject disaster, and urges President Trump to stop federal cannabis reform in its tracks.

Here’s my response as the editor-in-chief of Cultivated Media and an advocate for truthful reporting.

Let’s dive in: The argument in the op-ed boils down to, “legal weed causes disorder,” which both the writer, Charles Lehman, and his organization, the right-wing Manhattan Institute, have been pushing on social media and in other outlets.

It’s not a strong argument. It’s polemic.

The first study linked in the piece — in which much of the research is cherry-picked — shows the opposite of the author’s claims: It found no significant association between cannabis use disorder and legalization. And other experts have said the definition of cannabis use disorder, which Lehman relies on to illustrate the evils of legalization, is too broad to be a useful diagnosis.

In fact, the vast majority of researchers say more studies are needed to generate useful conclusions about many of the claims in the piece, and that changes seen in traffic accidents, hospital admissions, and homelessness pre- and post- legalization may have more to do with increased population or other policy shifts rather than legalization itself.

Many of Lehman’s other claims don’t meet scrutiny as well. While it is true that legalization has not killed the illicit market, much of that is because of:

• Federal bans on interstate commerce — cannabis can’t cross state lines so supply/demand is usually misaligned within states, leading to product diversion and wholesale price fluctuations which are difficult for operators to manage their balance sheets against.
• Early policy mistakes with respect to startup costs, taxes, access to capital, and the lack of enforcement on illicit operators.

The sky hasn’t fallen in Canada

It’s also important to note that we do have a clear example of federally coherent cannabis policy in Canada, which legalized in 2018. While the industry is still a work in progress for many companies and consumers, the sky has not fallen.

The vast majority of people who walk around downtown Toronto or midtown Manhattan — places that writers like Lehman or Alex Berenson maintain are filled with crime and disorder spurred by legalization — aren’t thinking about cannabis at all, unless they’re specifically seeking it out or happen to pass by a dispensary.

What also goes unsaid in the WSJ piece are the clear benefits of legalization, including capturing tax revenue from criminal organizations, fixing the sordid history of racialized policing, and creating economic opportunities for communities, often minorities or in low-income zip codes, that were punished for cannabis in the first place.

Legalization also means consumer safety: While the testing infrastructure for pesticides, yeast, and heavy metals in cannabis products certainly isn’t perfect, as we’ve covered in this newsletter, consumers at least know how much THC they’re ingesting because legal products are labeled. They’re able to choose lower doses or higher doses based on their needs, and not rely on what’s handed to them in a Ziploc bag.

All this is to say why researchers, unlike opinion writers, don’t work backwards from pre-ordained conclusions. Because once you do, you can bend evidence to fit your hypothesis neatly.

As it turns out, the reality of social science, like the humans it studies, is messy. Those who claim to see things in black-and-white, writers like Lehman or Berenson, are often pushing an agenda.

The bottom line: It’s not my view that legalization is a panacea to fix society’s ills. But it won’t cause them either.

In fact, outside of what we as cannabis nerds discuss daily in this newsletter, the impact of legalization on those who don’t buy, sell, or consume cannabis is minimal at best, as much research has shown.

As with any policy shift, allowing commercial cannabis sales, of course, has costs and benefits.

Using the policy levers regulators have available via licensing structures, taxation, and more to capture the benefits of legalization while ameliorating the real social costs is the core challenge.

States are truly a laboratory of democracy, and luckily we now have over a decade of data to work from to move cannabis policy in a better direction for consumers, for the industry, and for the general public.