A fact-checked debate about legal weed

Well, it sounds like you want to treat it like a legal product. Or a better way forward, which is just decriminalize it. This looks like a debate.

It's illegal! That's not true. But it's not.

Yes, these two advocates fundamentally disagree about a major policy issue. I support the legalization and regulation of cannabis for adults. I oppose legalization of cannabis.

We could have just had them show up and fight it out. That's how these things usually go. "No, I think.

. . " But when you watch people argue are you judging content or style?

And how do you know if they're even telling the truth? So we wanted to try something different. We asked both Paul and Will to send us five facts about cannabis legalization that their opponent would have to concede are true.

They fact checked each other. We fact checked them, too. And after going back and forth on the exact phrasing we landed on 6.

Do you both agree that these are true? Yes. Yes, I do.

They'll each present their facts and get to respond to the other's facts with a footnote. Okay, here we go. National polls consistently show.

. . that a majority of the American public support legalizing marijuana.

In 1969, a minority supported legalization. Today, it's nearly 70%. As more states have adopted legalization support among the public has risen in parallel.

There's no buyer's remorse. My footnote to that would be these polls often give what we believe to be a false dichotomy of choice. If I have to choose between arrest and incarceration or legalization I'm going to choose legalization as well.

But when we dig a little bit deeper and there's some national polls from Emerson that show that support for legalization falls well below 50% when people are presented with other options such as decriminalization and the medicinal use of the cannabis plant. Well, let's talk about those polls, Will. Even when you provide more choices the most popular choice is legalizing marijuana by adults.

My name is Will Jones. I'm the director of community engagement and outreach at Smart Approaches to Marijuana. I really believe that we can explore better policy options when it comes to marijuana policy than either criminalization.

. . or commercialization.

Decriminalization removes penalties for the personal possession and use of marijuana. Legalization and commercialization would allow for businesses to market and sell marijuana. And so that's the primary difference between the two.

A recent study reported higher rates of fatal car crashes in states that had legal recreational marijuana. We have to look at, what are all the areas of society and of public health and safety that are going to be impacted through legalization and commercialization? In fact, the study you cited looked at a subset of states.

Even the authors of this study acknowledge. . .

it may have nothing to do with the change in the status of marijuana at all. That there's a number of different confounders. Fortunately, we have real world experience in this country reducing rates of drunk driving.

I am confident that we can continue to reduce rates of drug driving. When you commercialize something, you have advertising. You have marketing.

That increases use. That's what it's supposed to do. And when you have more people using, that percentage of people that use irresponsibly is going to represent a larger number of people.

Do we know whether use of marijuana goes up after legalization? It tends to go up in people that are about 26. And so, yes.

The vision here is that we can craft policy with marijuana where we don't create something that creates a negative public health impact that we then have to address with massive campaigns afterwards. My name is Paul Armentano. I always believed strongly in civil liberties.

In a world that doesn't just accept alcohol but celebrates the use of alcohol. It is unjust to be ruining people's lives over their use of a plant. Police in the United States still make hundreds of thousands of low level marijuana arrests every year.

Over 90% of those arrests are for simple possession. And the results of these arrests are significant. People lose their jobs.

People lose their professional licensure their right to vote to possess a gun subsidized housing. In some states, they even lose the right to adopt a child. And those arrested disproportionately are young people poor people and people of color.

So I agree 100% that there is systemic inequality and injustice in the way that the enforcement of marijuana laws has been carried out in our country. But when we look at the data from states that have legalized we see that systemic inequality in law enforcement even around the laws of legalization, continues to exist. We still continue to see disparities.

Absolutely. Nobody ever said legalizing cannabis was going to end systemic racism or even racism in policing. But it certainly removes a major tool from that toolbox.

And we've seen in states that have legalized total arrests for marijuana dropped significantly. A 2017 survey found that 81% of marijuana business owners in the U. S.

are white. This is a huge contrast to the people that are most often talked about when we hear about marijuana legalization, which is entrepreneurs of color and reinvesting in communities harmed by the war on drugs. That's a great idea.

But that's not the reality of how it's panning out at all. The other concern is that the placement of marijuana businesses is disproportionately in communities of color just like we see with liquor stores. We all want to see greater inclusion in the commercial marijuana industry.

Of course, one of the reasons we don't have that diversity now is because the federal law treats cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance. . .

which means that banks and other financial institutions will not provide lending, will not provide loans to these would-be entrepreneurs to allow them to get their foot in the door. In fact, we have a potential fix: the Safe Banking Act. But your organization, Will, opposes that change in federal policy which would help remedy this very situation.

Yeah, and I think that's because the Safe Banking Act would open the floodgates to huge tobacco companies and alcohol companies totally taking over the industry. And it's a great idea that we want to have smaller entrepreneurs get into this. But we know how business works in the US.

We know how capitalism works. On multiple fronts we're going to continue to see this inequality exist. Decriminalization leaves the unregulated marketplace intact.

And it continues to perpetuate police interaction with the community. It shouldn't have to perpetuate law enforcement. I think that we can craft decriminalization in a way that completely removes it from the criminal justice system and treats it more as a health issue.

I think like Portugal has done a great job at de-stigmatizing use and for people to have problematic use to have services provided for them. When you say that decriminalization perpetuates law enforcement contact with marijuana users and sellers can you explain why that would be? If it's not a crime, why are the police involved?

Because marijuana is illicit. Which means it's contraband. So if the police encounter somebody possessing or using cannabis they have a legal responsibility to interact, to seize that cannabis.

They also can continue to search individuals, pull them over, frisk them because they claim they smelled cannabis because, again, cannabis itself is an illicit substance, not a legal one. And if a decriminalization law allows for that, then it's a poorly crafted decriminalization law. Will, it sounds like you want Washington DC.

People can possess marijuana. They can grow marijuana. But there's no regulated commercial market for people to obtain marijuana.

And that's why we have unregulated shops gifting marijuana products, selling unregulated products. Is that a preferable policy to one where the commercial market is licensed and regulated? I do think it's preferable but I think that is because the shops came into place with the understanding that eventually it would be commercialized.

Even more ideally: We create a new world, a new concept where it's like Hey, grow this yourself. Or if you want to have it and share it with friends, do that. But this is not something that we're going to allow industries to sell.

Big tobacco and alcohol companies have invested billions of dollars into the cannabis industry and are lobbying for legalization at the federal and state levels. And this is especially concerning because we know the track record that these companies have of addiction-for-profit whether we're talking about alcohol or the tobacco industries. It raises some concerns for public health that I think are very important.

Certainly there are commercial interests. But to imply that they are the ones driving this train is simply disingenuous. This is an issue that was largely pushed on the grassroots level.

. . 20, 30 years ago.

And it remains the grassroots level that's pushing this issue today. Not corporations, not big business but in fact, the people. Whoever has pushed this for 20 years, at the end of the day there's big tobacco and alcohol companies standing by, ready to profit off of that.

And that's a big concern. I think Will's proposed solutions policies like decriminalization, don't go far enough. .

. because at the end of the day if we don't want criminal entrepreneurs being the ones providing cannabis if we want purity of products if we want products that are labeled and regulated. .

. then we have to have legalization. Because we can't impose regulations and rules on a decriminalized substance.

What this discussion has showed is that we need to move past the punitive policies that we've had for marijuana in the past years in our country while still avoiding the excesses of commercialization. What you see from continued habitual use for heavy users that's where you start to see the negative public health costs whether that's on driving or whether that's on mental health, whether that's on youth use. We have to move forward in a way that isn't going to allow for the exploitation of vulnerable communities by addiction for profit companies.

Let's cut. So that's it. That's our take on a debate.

Big thanks to Paul Armentano and Will Jones for participating in this experiment. If there are other topics you'd like to see please let us know in the comments.