Piers Morgan, Bill Maher: Patrick Kennedy Reefer Madness, Child’s Play to Dismiss With Hard Data

Last night, Patrick Kennedy joined CNN’s Piers Morgan to discuss marijuana legalization on his recurring “Gone to Pot” segment.

Before getting into Patrick’s “truths”, hats off to Piers for using his massive reach to now regularly discuss cannabis reform. Morgan said, “I’m slightly on the fence about this, but I’m lending myself more to legalizing because I think it’s better than the alternative… We’re going to keep going over this on the show, so we’ll have you all back and debate it all over again, because it’s something everyone in America is talking about.”

Other sites, such as MPP, NORML and StopTheDrugWar have all railed against Patrick Kennedy‘s hypocrisy as someone whose family made their fortune off of alcohol (similar to CO Gov. Hickenlooper) and the vested profit interest of his new SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana) organization, which “appears to be mainly a front group for drug rehabbers.” SAM’s motivations are probably about as honest as fellow rehabbers SMART.

What I want to focus on, where others have not, is defusing Patrick Kennedy’s most insidious line of baseless attacks around cannabis usage and teenagers in a post-legalization world with hard data.

On June 14th, Bill Maher (whereas Piers was more in a group moderator role) did a fantastic job calling out Patrick Kennedy on sounding “like you’ve been hanging around with Nancy Reagan in 1983.” Bill rightfully said, “You’re reasoning is adults shouldn’t do things because kids might. Adults shouldn’t have fire or drive cars under that reasoning, too. Kids might do all sorts of bad things. Parents have to stop them and teachers have to stop them…”

Whether on Maher’s or Morgan’s show, Kennedy just drones on and on forever about these magical facts and truths he’s learned if we head down the legalization path, but he never provides any actual facts to support his bullshit. It deeply pains me no one challenges Kennedy’s fiction of America’s youth turning into cannabis-addicted zombies, as what better way to scare people at the voting booth than with our children’s future? 

Patrick Kennedy, and anyone who has to try to have an informed dialogue with this over-privileged prohibition-profiting fearmonger, lets look at a rich history of data to disprove your cannabis usage among teens:

Thankfully, we have years of data with legalized medical marijuana and the impact on teenager cannabis usage rates. Numerous studies show the enactment of statewide medical cannabis laws is not associated with increased rates of adolescent marijuana consumption.

1. American Journal of Public Health  2003-2011 study: the passage of medical marijuana laws in various states has had no “statistically significant … effect on the prevalence of either lifetime or 30-day marijuana use” by adolescents residing in those states.
2. University of Florida College of Medicine 2003-2011 study: “found no evidence of intermediate-term effects of passage of state MMLs (medical marijuana laws) on the prevalence or frequency of adolescent non-medical marijuana use in the states evaluated. Our results suggest that, in the states assessed here, MMLs have not measurably affected adolescent marijuana use.”
3. Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany 2012 study: “Our results suggest that the legalization of medical marijuana was not accompanied by increases in the use of marijuana or other substances such as alcohol and cocaine among high school students. Interestingly, several of our estimates suggest that marijuana use actually declined with the passage of medical marijuana laws.”
4. McGill University 2002-2009 study: “[P]assing MMLs (medical marijuana laws) decreased past-month use among adolescents … and had no discernible effect on the perceived riskiness of monthly use. … [These] estimates suggest that reported adolescent marijuana use may actually decrease following the passing of medical marijuana laws.”
5. Brown University 2011 / Texas A&M 2007 studies:  “[C]onsistent with other studies of the liberalization of cannabis laws, medical cannabis laws do not appear to increase use of the drug.”
6. Rhode Island Hospital “researchers looked at marijuana use among youth between 1993 and 2009, a time when 13 states legalized the drug for medical use. They found no correlation between legalization of the drug and increased use among teens in a given state. In fact, slight drops in teen use were seen in some states where marijuana was legalized.“

The next time Patrick Kennedy looks to scare the masses into continuing prohibition with his “truths about legalization” for our nation’s future, please share the above hard studies. Ask for less grandstanding and pandering, here’s history to look at but where are your hard facts Mr. Kennedy? The only cannabis-related stance coming out of Kennedy’s mouth I can agree with him on is that “we need to treat this as a public health crisis, not a criminal justice issue.”

It’s simple common sense, no one wants our children prematurely experimenting with cannabis. It’s also common sense that access to drugs in an illegal black market is much easier for children than in a regulated and legalized market.