Rumination on “The Great Experiment”

The media has been calling Washington and Colorado’s legal weed market the “Great Experiment.” If you’ve been smoking weed for a while, like me, you may roll your eyes everytime you hear that phrase. It just conjures images of white-frocked scientists, armed with clip-boards, peering down at us like we’re on the Truman Show, recording data on our behavior like lemurs at a nature preserve.

To me, the “experiment” should be seeing just how many lives marijuana ruins in the absence of illegality. Weed has never been the problem, its bullshit designation as an illicit substance has always been what’s wrong.

For the sake of playing along, however, let’s explore what we know about this “Experiment.”

Focusing on the “marijuana made me kill my family” type of stories certainly makes for great ad sales so it’s no wonder that is what gets shoved in our faces. However, these stories are far, far from typical. Furthermore, spending media time examining those highly-specious outliers paints an inaccurate picture of how legalization, as this great experiment, is really going.

The converse is also true. As much as I’d like to be able to write this article pointing out all the awesome things that have materialized as a result of legalization, the simple truth of the matter is that very little is, in fact, known. Yes, legal weed has resulted in tax revenues and unburdened (somewhat) state legal systems and, yes, there are stories about bad reactions to cannabis. What complicates the answer to the “was legalization a good idea” question is that precious little time has passed from which to gather that data.

Mark Kleiman, UCLA professor and WA state marijuana advisor said, “I think weve learned very little so far from Colorado. There will be bad things coming out of legalization, but they’re not going to happen quickly.”

MSNBC reported, “There’s little data so far to suggest that marijuana legalization has led to serious public safety problems. Despite the proliferation of terrifying anecdotes publicized by anti-legalization advocates, crime has actually dropped in Colorado since legalization. One of these stories is that of Richard Kirk, who killed his wife after possibly ingesting marijuana and prescription pain pills. Some reporting has actually omitted the pills – the interaction of the two could have contributed to the incident – leaving readers with the impression that consuming a marijuana candy bar alone may have caused the psychotic episode that led Kirk to retrieve a gun and shoot his wife. Police took a blood test, but the results may not be revealed until Kirk’s case goes to court, so we won’t know for a while what role drugs may have played.”

Stanford Psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys offers a great counter-argument to this recent Dowdish, tainted view of cannabis safety. “These are all multi-determined events. We know that because they’re rare – if they were simply determined they’d be happening more often. In the aggregate, Americans use marijuana billions of times a year, and there’s very few stories like this. If marijuana had this effect in a prevalent fashion, these things would have been happening for years and years and years… it’s highly unusual for people without steady use and without a tendency toward psychosis to become psychotic from using marijuana.”

So, we really don’t know much of anything. To my very biased eyes, I’d say there is more evidence that the Experiment has been a success than the opposite. I take great comfort from what the Stanford professor said. I would have to think, purely based on math, that if, of all the billions of marijuana uses annually, only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent result in a “pot is the devil” newsworthy story, there is probably not much credence to any claims of harm, certainly not enough to label the “Experiment” a failure by any stretch.