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Colorado flag with marijuana leaf
It has now been 10 years since the first state in the nation, Colorado, legalized adult-use marijuana by going against its own governor, John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper ascribed to the then-ubiquitous belief that legal marijuana would bring ruin, as conservatives have been prophesying since before President Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs. Hickenlooper turned his opinion around when facts became impossible to ignore.
Fear of Marijuana Is Baseless
“Colorado is known for many great things—marijuana should not be one of them,” then-governor Hickenlooper wrote in 2012 in an attempt to kill the legalization effort in his state. “Amendment 64 has the potential to increase the number of children using drugs and would detract from efforts to make Colorado the healthiest state in the nation. It sends the wrong message to kids that drugs are OK.”
This message has been reheated and served again every time that progress is being made. Wisconsinites might recognize Hickenlooper’s 2012 fears being parroted by Republican Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who opposes cannabis reform by saying that we do not “have a need to have more drugs in society.” Legal marijuana is wrongly believed to lead to an increased crime rate, more traffic accidents, youth drug use and worse health outcomes, often mixed with perceived moral failings.
What is most striking about rightwing prophecies of doom if marijuana were to become legal is that they are not based on any data or reality. Cannabis was legal and widely cultivated across the world and in the United States for all of human history minus the last 50 years. Cannabis crops were so valuable that they were considered legal tender in the United States, and the government greatly encouraged farmers to grow cannabis both before its criminalization and during World War II, when it was temporarily legalized to help with the war effort.
The fear of marijuana has always been rooted in racism. The recreational use of cannabis was introduced in the United States in the early 1900s by Mexican immigrants, and the substance became reviled by association with brown people. When Prohibition came to an end and an entire industry that relied on banning alcohol feared to become obsolete, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was founded and marijuana became the next thing to ban after booze. At the time, the New York Academy of Medicine released research proving the harmless nature of marijuana, and the general attitude towards the plant was relatively lax even after it was technically banned. Then came President Richard Nixon, who heated up the current fear of marijuana.
“The Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” Nixon top aide John Ehrlichman admitted. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
What the Colorado Experiment Proved
Baseless fear mongering cannot survive being faced with reality. The Reefer Madness generation had only known propaganda until Colorado took the step towards progress. They took the necessary steps to study and record the real-world consequences of legalization by publishing a biyearly report, “Impacts of Marijuana Legalization in Colorado.”
Data shows that the number of drivers caught driving under the influence of marijuana remained stable after legalization, although the number of drivers who were high on several drugs, mostly a cocktail of weed and alcohol, increased. These people would have been drunk behind the wheel regardless of marijuana’s legal status. Neither crime nor public health were visibly affected at all by legalization. As for marijuana use among the youth, it actually decreased: In 2011, 22% of high schoolers had used marijuana in the last month, in 2019 it was down to 20.6%.
“A big focus for me was kids. I was so nervous that kids—I mean 14 to 18 years old, high school kids—would use more marijuana more frequently,” Hickenlooper admitted during a recent interview with the Coalition for Cannabis Policy, Education, and Regulation. “We have been tracking marijuana use among high school students every two years ever since. Teenage use is flat, and we’ve shown that we can legalize it safely in Colorado. I think we have proven that there is no increase in experimentation among teenagers. There is no change in frequency of use, no change in driving while high; all the things that we were most worried about didn't come to pass.”
This is a surprise to exactly zero persons who looked at actual data relating to cannabis use. Most recently, the United States’ number one drug researcher, National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow, reiterated this well-understood concept in front of a Senate committee, where she explained to surprised lawmakers that legalization does not lead to increased rates of marijuana consumption among teenagers. When the distribution of marijuana is handled by drug dealers, it is no surprise that kids can purchase it; but legalization simultaneously kneecaps the black market and limits the ability for underage customers to buy marijuana from legal retailers.
“It’s an amazing thing to me,” Hickenlooper continued in that same interview. “In this situation, the data that came out was different than almost everyone expected. I was pretty surprised that the data overwhelmingly showed again and again the most compelling reasons why we should reschedule marijuana on the national level. Let the states make their own minds about how they want to go about implementing marijuana, just like we do with alcohol.”
“It has been years since we legalized recreational marijuana through the Amendment 64 statewide citizen-driven initiative—that I opposed. I didn't want Colorado to be the experiment, the petri dish for one of the great social experiments of the century.” But now that reality has replaced fear mongering, Hickenlooper is first in line to call for federal reform of marijuana laws. “I'm committed to it as someone who's seen the light and come around based on the new data.”
