Nationwide, marijuana legalization is becoming more normal. Colorado’s dispensaries are hailed as an economic success story, and other states are following suit—New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has indicated he’ll support legalization after New York City’s choice to gradually decriminalize the drug. The trend is global: Canada recently joined Uruguay in fully legalizing cannabis, and Lebanon is also mulling legalization.
Marijuana legalization has always had its opponents—including the alcohol lobby, which wants to protect its monopoly on legal intoxicants, and the prison/industrial complex, which fears a decrease in the number of nonviolent drug offenders who keep jail cells full. Now the reactionaries have another champion athwart history: former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson.
In a pair of op-eds in the New York Times (1/4/19) and the Wall Street Journal (1/4/19) promoting his new anti-marijuana book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence, Berenson—whose main literary success has been authorship of War on Terror fiction thrillers—flipped the news on its head. Legalization advocates, whom he calls corporate campaigners aiming to set up new businesses for profit, have sold the American people a false image of a perfect and absolutely safe product, and states are taking their cue from them and no one else.
Berenson’s insistence that marijuana is linked to mental illness and violent behavior, as well as to the use of more dangerous drugs, comes with spritely portrayals of pot users who have also committed heinous crimes—“who’d cut up his grandmother or set fire to his apartment.” In Mother Jones (1/5/19), reporter Stephanie Mencimer conveys Berenson’s research with a tidbit about British colonial officials who chalked up a fifth of mental patients in Raj-era India as victims of pot-related injury. (Pot-smoking led to “at least one beheading”—if one trusts the public-health expertise of 19th century colonial occupiers, as Berenson seems to.)
Jesse Singal in New York magazine (1/7/19) noted that Berenson’s claims about pot-provoked violence are grounded in egregious cherry-picking. His Times op-ed asserts, “The first four states to legalize—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—have seen sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults since 2014.” But as drug policy expert Mark Kleiman told Singal, “Nothing interesting happened with regard to pot in 2014”—it’s just a low-point in the national homicide rate that can be used to create the illusion of a meaningful uptick.
More systematic attempts to look at violence rates in conjunction with changes in marijuana laws don’t seem to back up Berenson’s alarmism. A study in the Economic Journal (9/6/17) found that “when a state on the Mexican border legalized medical use of the drug, violent crime fell by 13 percent on average,” according to a write-up in the Guardian (1/13/18). A paper in the Journal of Drug Issues (1/13/16) likewise found “no evidence of negative spillover effects from medical marijuana laws (MMLs) on violent or property crime,” but rather “significant drops in rates of violent crime associated with state MMLs.”
In short, Berenson is good at cherry-picking a few crazy examples of where pot use has been linked to violence, with questionable evidence. In light of the mountain of evidence linking the legal drug alcohol to violence on a much grander scale, we have to ask: What is Berenson’s point, other than to denounce a peaceful transition to legal and regulated drug consumption?
Paul Arementano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law, challenged Berenson’s assertions about a clear-cut link between marijuana use and schizophrenia. He said in an email:
Many scientific experts in the field attribute any association between cannabis and psychiatric illness to shared vulnerability, not unlike the association that exists between tobacco use and psychiatric illness.
Indeed, people with schizophrenia smoke tobacco at double or triple the rate of the public at large—but this provokes a debate over whether a craving for nicotine is a side effect of psychiatric symptoms, or whether the elevated use might mean patients actually find it helpful in self-medicating schizophrenia (World Journal of Psychiatry, 3/22/15), rather than an automatic assumption that correlation implies causality.
Arementano also takes issue with Berenson’s dismissal of the medical value of marijuana:
His claims with regard to a supposed lack of established therapeutic efficacy also lack merit, as the cannabis plant is recognized by statute as a medicine in a majority of US states and various compounds of the plant are approved in FDA-marketed medicines. A recent review of FDA-approved clinical trials assessing the safety and efficacy of whole-plant cannabis in various patient populations determined: “Based on evidence currently available the Schedule I classification is not tenable; it is not accurate that cannabis has no medical value, or that information on safety is lacking.”
As for Berenson’s point about corporate campaigners, there is a completely valid set of questions for those genuinely concerned about racial justice: how white entrepreneurs are poised to make millions while black and brown people remain in jail. Some states are insisting any profiteering be paired with release, but there is still painful irony in seeing former Republican House Speaker John Boehner flacking for corporate marijuana growers (New York Times, 4/19/18) while nearly 80 percent of people still in prison on federal drug offenses are black of Latino, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. However, this injustice is not Berenson’s concern.
Berenson’s cannabis alarm-raising is not a new genre. In New York, Inside City Hall host Errol Louis (Daily News, 4/24/18) has warned against the “perils of legal pot,” and the New York Post (12/30/18) promoted the press-savvy former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s view that legalizing marijuana would be “opening up Pandora’s box.” Berenson is taking it too a wider, national level. Says Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing:
The backlash is driven in part because a whole generation of neoconservatives have rested their ideology on the idea that all the problems in the world are the result of unregulated individualism, and anything that loosens people’s freedom around drugs, sexuality, gender and race is going to unleash a Pandora’s Box of more relativism. They want to fight the marijuana legalization battle because it could lead to further progressive social reforms.
Despite Berenson’s fear-stoking, he claims that he is no prohibitionist, but rather believes in some sort of half-measure by keeping it unlawful while reducing the penalties: “If arrests for marijuana possession are a major racial justice concern, the solution is decriminalizing possession, turning it into a violation equivalent to littering,” he wrote in his Times op-ed:
But advocacy groups don’t view decriminalization as an acceptable compromise. They want full legalization, making marijuana a state-regulated and -taxed drug that businesses can sell and profit from.
But it isn’t simply jail that black people fear in the drug war. Philando Castile was murdered by a police officer who claimed to have smelled marijuana smoke in his car during a traffic stop, and countless other black men who have become martyrs in the Black Lives Matter movement were initially accused of petty “quality of life” infractions. (Eric Garner was choked to death on the street because he was accused of selling “loose” cigarettes.) Berenson seems oblivious to the danger posed by anything that incentivizes interaction between cops and communities of color.
And as Vitale noted, even things like fines and penalties fall more harshly on those who can least afford them—to say nothing of the way guilty pleas for petty crimes can be used against individuals later on in their lives. Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue, told FAIR:
Decriminalization would be a happy medium for white college kids, but not for everyone else. It’s not unusual for traffic violations to become a chance for the police to stop, question and search, and often arrest, people of color more disproportionately than white people. Once the pretext for the stop is there, there is a lot of discretion left to the officer.
In New York City, for example, which has ostensibly already undergone decriminalization, racial injustice endures. As the Daily News (1/8/19) reported, “In all, 89 percent of all new Yorkers arrested for smoking marijuana last year through November 23 were either black or Hispanic.”
Berenson falls into a familiar trap of conceiving that the only way society can confront a public health concern is through some sort of criminalization, a symptom of our neoliberal hegemony—overlooking how many advocates for legalization actually do want the marijuana industry to be regulated, taxed and unionized. Of course, like any psychoactive substance, marijuana use has both positive and negative effects, all of which should be studied and monitored—which is also true about wine, butter or the vast majority of prescription drugs we take. A normal, functioning industrial state would regulate these things through the appropriate channels, like food and drug rules, environmental agencies and the like.
But the erosion of the social safety net since the rise of Reaganism coincided with the intense militarization of policing in the War on Drugs, creating a world where the state is only strong when it’s punishing rather than protecting the public at large, with the latter seen as a socialist boondoggle. Berenson’s attachment to this Cold War logic suggests he has failed to demilitarize his mind.
The fact is, Berenson’s alarms actually make the case for full legalization. “With legalization,” said Vitale,
people know what they’re getting and it generates tax revenues for economic programs that replace the black market drug economy You reduce the kind of organized criminality in the whole process. There still remains a lot of grossly inaccurate hysteria of any potential harms of marijuana, but even if there are secondary risks, those risks are much smaller than those of all kinds of legal activity.
What’s good enough for alcohol — which is linked to domestic violence, vehicular fatalities and liver disease — is good enough for marijuana. But that logic probably wouldn’t have landed Berenson a book deal.
Pot shots that miss the mark
This is a fine and timely article. I wish I could share it on my facebook page, but I cannot.
Why can’t you share it?
What a great idea, to use a product that people can afford, and some people can even grow at their own home to cut out big pharma bills ! When I read about marijuana oil helping kids with epilepsy, I thought GREAT IDEA! I read a story once about soldiers in the Korean War who found some marijuana growing in their North Korean prison area, and using this, helped them to survive . Cats like kitty marijuana ( catnip) and that’s great too. It’s also wonderful that this is being made legal, so that all those illegal growers will leave the National Parks alone and stop polluting the parks with pesticides and crime. Remember too, that aspirin came from a tree bark, and I don’t know anyone would would put the horrors of Big Pharma before the trust of Nature. Congratulations to all the new farmers.
Great Article, thank you Fair and Ari Paul. I am an old guy Once upon a time I sort of paid attention to music, like background noise, but I never really listened until I got some friends who turned me on to Pot and played music for me, then I discovered a whole new world, Peaceful, harmonious, place…That feeling of Harmony and peace is what the Right wing Neo-liberals fear the most…Their agenda is to keep people living in fear, and thus easily manipulated. Peace is the last thing they want, as you cannot sell many weapons to a peaceful planet. Their whole petty agenda is to grab from the people every last Almighty Dollar, and maintain the slave labor state by any means possible……
“Right-wing Neo-“LIBERALS”??” This sounds like an oxymoron to me. With so many true blue right wing fascists and conservatives of the worst sort growing now in the U.S. seems like a pretty far stretch to say “right wing neo-LIBERALS” What does this mean? Who are you talking about? Otherwise, I agree with everything else you say George Trudeau. Any relation to Gary, the great true-blue liberal cartoonist?
Good article! And I have to say that it’s more of a fallacy to say that ANY drugs ‘cause’ violence, since so many MILLIONS of people imbibe them and DON’T commit violent acts. There’s typically a complex mixture of numerous factors (ie; psychological self-image, cultural/societal norms about violence, economic status, access to weapons, stress, hormone levels, etc) that ‘cause’ violent acts. A happy, relatively well adjusted person won’t go out and kill/ injure people just because he imbibes in anything once — even meth. Now prolonged usage and chronic dependency of something illegal can often exacerbate or even create some of the previously mentioned factors that can potentially result in violent acts, but it’s an indirect/2or3 step path.
Most (or all ?) of the social problems related to crime and antisocial behavior are related to prohibition and anti-drug enforcement. And yes that applies to ALL/ANY drugs that are known. The worst and most disingenuous argument of the prohibition crowd is “the slippery slope” that, if legalized school children will suddenly seek out Heroin and tiny tots will become prostitutes to get a “fix”…. Ridiculous .. Actually, as use becomes less dangerous and less possible to romanticize many users start to become bored with it, they begin to de-valorize use and often begin to resent the “ball and chain” of chemical dependence and seek treatment…Those who have used drugs for many years in spite of hard and broken lives and much suffering, most likely do so because they need the drug and they are self medicating..in such cases it is probably cruel to constantly enforce abstainence ., ..im talking about drugs like opiate drugs which form a physical dependance, here, not Marijuana.The truth is there is strong argument to extend the policy of legalization as far as practical.
Thanks pointing out this ridiculous drug war attack on cannabis.
We are not the “Land of the Free”. Countries that are truly free, do not prohibit entheogens.
Excellent analysis. Perhaps Berenson’s underwear is too tight. My recent experience with some clients has changed my belief that marijuana use is always harmless, but the damage to users and our society from criminal enforcement of prohibition is infinitely more severe than any harm from the psychoactive effects of the drug. We should acknowledge that, as with beer, our resources would be better invested in deterring abuse than in punishing responsible, personal use.
Drugs should be decriminalized and addiction treated as the health issue it is. The decriminalization of drugs would effect a precipitous drop in violent crime, globally.
The other industry lobby that feels threatened, is BIG PHARMA!
Imagine if you will, the day when we actually have the “freedom,” (a word used loosely in modern times), Ahem! The freedom to grow our own medicine in our homes? Instead of having to beg some doctor for relief from the numerous maladies, pain, etc., with some sort of costly prescription medication! CHA-CHING!
So, all the industries who know what will happen when we break free from them digging as deep as they can into our bank accounts, will continue to spend big money to spin their propaganda!
And for sure, there will be the talking heads, spewing B.S. Perhaps some of which, (not making any direct accusations here), who are tied in some way to these industries? Or just on their dime? I’m just throwing that out there, because our whole political, and economic system, has been corrupted by the big money, special interests! (Some of us are paying attention out here!)
IMO there is nothing in life so precious that it cannot be overdone – including, sadly, parental love. Weed is no exception either. The fact that there is no yet known lethal dose of marijuana, does not mean the weed cannot be overdone – but this is true of everything. Compulsive consumption is epidemic in the US and those who are possessed by this demon are to be pitied and perhaps treated and monitored.
CR – True-enough that ‘anything can be overdone’, even water — a fundamental necessity of human life (we’ll literally die in 4 or 5 days without it) — can drowned us if too much is consumed too quickly. Eating too much sugary and fatty food has resulted in an obesity problem (with all its deadly related health issues). From what little I’ve seen/experienced of marijuana usage, overconsumption CAN result in a chronic state of reduced awareness, sleepiness, and some coughing. I don’t know that there are any long-term, irreversible effects, though I would wonder about things like emphysema or COPD from long-term smoke-inhalation over decades.
Interesting legal thought — IF our legal system TRULY wanted to apply the SAME standard (ie; as those historically applied to weed dealers) consistently across the board, wouldn’t there be even STRONGER penalties for the sale of tobacco and alcohol (and even high-sugar/high-fat foods), where the heads of the associated corporations would be charged/tried/ convicted of manslaughter/3rd degree murder?
Nice work, Ari Paul.
-Hugh Miller