As Pot Prohibition Crumbles, Marijuana Consumers Are Less Likely To Abuse It
It stands to reason that legalizing marijuana, by making it easier, cheaper, and less risky to obtain, would encourage consumption. That is mostly a positive development, since it implies greater consumer satisfaction as more people enjoy a product that prohibition made harder to get. But it also stands to reason that as marijuana consumption rises, so will marijuana-related problems. The extent of those problems is a big part of the current debate about the wisdom of emulating Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska by treating marijuana suppliers as legitimate businesses instead of criminal organizations.
Contrary to what prohibitionists tend to assume, the increase in marijuana-related problems following legalization may not be proportional to the increase in consumption. It’s plausible that people prone to excess are less likely to be deterred by prohibition than people of more moderate habits. If so, problem users may represent a smaller share of cannabis consumers after legalization than they did before, which means marijuana’s benefit-to-cost ratio would improve. A study published yesterday by JAMA Psychiatry provides some evidence that as the number of cannabis consumers increases, the percentage who experience serious cannabis-related problems will decline.
That is not the way most news outlets presented the study’s results. “Marijuana use has more than doubled in the U.S. since the beginning of the century,” NBC News reported, “but so have problems for users.” Reuters’ gloss was similar: “As attitudes and laws in the US have become more tolerant of marijuana, the proportion of adults using and abusing the substance at least doubled between 2001 and 2013.” Under the headline “Marijuana Use—and Abuse—in the U.S. Has Doubled in the Last Decade,” Newsweek declared that “marijuana use disorders are now a bigger problem than ever.” These alarming reports not only exaggerate the bad news in the study; they overlook the good news.
Examining data from two large surveys of adults conducted in 2001-02 and 2012-13, Columbia University psychiatrist Deborah Hasin and her colleagues found that the share of respondents who reported using marijuana in the previous year rose from 4.1% to 9.5%. Hasin et al. argue that “more permissive” marijuana “laws and attitudes” are largely responsible for this increase in cannabis consumption. But the same factors may also have made survey respondents more willing to admit marijuana use, in which case some of the increase would be illusory.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2015/10/22/as-pot-prohibition-crumbles-marijuana-consumers-are-less-likely-to-abuse-it/
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