Photo Credit: Sage Elyse
“Look at Prohibition. [...] If you don’t give it to them, it’s going to come here illegally. They’re going to make them. But instead of Reynolds or Juul—legitimate companies—making something that is safe, they are going to be selling stuff on street corners that could be horrible. That is the one problem I can’t seem to forget. You just have to look at the history of it. Now, instead of having a flavor that’s at least safe, they’re going to be having a flavor that’s poison. That’s a big problem.”
Surprisingly enough, the pro-legalization argument above was made by none other than President Donald Trump at a meeting about vaping. But let’s ignore who said this and focus on the—very good—point that was made here.
Black Market Products Can Be Deadly
When marijuana, or any other product, is illegal, the only option to obtain it is through the black market. The parallel with Prohibition-era alcohol is obvious. While we can enjoy safe liqueurs with a million twists in flavors and exotic ingredients—such as Milk & Honey’s cream liqueur, made with date honey imported from the Sea of Galilee—our grandfathers had no choice but to drink moonshine and risk methanol poisoning, blindness and even death. An article published in 1922 in The New York Times estimated that 130 Americans died and 22 were rendered blind from bootleg alcohol in the six months prior.
The same holds true for marijuana. When the only available products are untested, unlabeled, of unknown provenance and bought under the table from a dealer with no oversight, there is no telling what the purchased product contains.
“Lacing is a very common practice for some drugs, [...] drugs that are sold by weight may be laced with other substances in order to add weight or bulk them up to enhance their profitability,” according to the American Addiction Centers. Some of the products street weed can be laced with include embalming fluid, rat poison and lead, which can turn a mellow, after-work relaxant into a much more dangerous substance without the user’s knowledge.
Another danger for the under-informed marijuana user is synthetic cannabinoids, which are human-made alternatives to marijuana. “They are often marketed as safe, legal alternatives to that drug. In fact, they are not safe and may affect the brain much more powerfully than marijuana; their actual effects can be unpredictable and, in some cases, more dangerous or even life-threatening,” the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) warns. To avoid the minefield that is the marijuana black market, many tend to find one trustworthy dealer and stick with them. But new users—in particular teenagers and young adults—are disproportionately at risk of being harmed by predatory dealers and low-quality products.
Legalization Means Safety, Transparency, Quality
The rate of marijuana consumption is not significantly lower when the substance is illegal as opposed to when it is legal. Nearly half of the American population admitted to have used marijuana in 2014, and more than 10% enjoyed some pot at least semi-regularly. For these millions of Americans, legalizing marijuana leads directly to a safer and more enjoyable marijuana market, with competition driving prices down and quality up, and, more importantly, regulations and oversight.
The recent outbreak of what has been dubbed “vaping illness” perfectly illustrates this. Many people across the country have been victims of similar symptoms after vaping. After a swift investigation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified vitamin E acetate as the culprit; vitamin E acetate is a thickening agent popular in THC-containing vaping products in particular.
The CDC announced its findings on Thursday, Nov. 21, and, almost immediately, actions were taken to protect vaping aficionados, and the chemical compound was banned in several states within days—which is the same event that led to the Trump quote shared at the beginning of this article. In places where vaping marijuana is still illegal, however, users can only use illicit and unregulated products that may still contain vitamin E acetate, thus gravely endangering their lives.
When marijuana is legal, products go through an extensive testing process to ensure their composition, safety and potency are all in line with regulations. In Colorado, for instance, all marijuana retail products must go through these tests and be clearly labeled in accordance with the law to ensure there are no nasty surprises for customers. The legality of it enables states to have licensed marijuana testing labs that meet standards agreed upon by industry experts, with qualified, educated employees, quality control, security, sample tracking and massive oversight.
This links back to an issue that is often cited, ironically, by opponents of legalization: the rising potency of marijuana. It is a well-documented phenomenon that marijuana that was available decades ago was significantly weaker than the street weed we see today.
“In the early 1990s, the average tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis) content in confiscated cannabis samples was roughly 3.7% for marijuana and 7.5% for sinsemilla (a higher-potency marijuana from specially tended female plants). In 2013, it was 9.6% for marijuana and 16% for sinsemilla,” NIDA explains. Among the anti-marijuana crowd, this breeds fear that the drug is becoming more powerful, especially since it is impossible to determine the potency of a certain plant without trying it—if it has been purchased off the street. Smoking weed becomes a gamble.
“Although the rise in the concentration of THC is not a concern per se, the variability makes it more difficult to titrate the dose to the correct effect,” Lewis Nelson, professor and vice chair for academic affairs at New York University’s Department of Emergency Medicine, told Forbes. “This means that users are more likely to consume excessive doses, leading to adverse clinical effects.”
However, legalization would mandate transparency, as growers, sellers and testers could be held accountable for their products and be forced to give an accurate, reviewed account of their potency. As a result, we can already see stores (in legal states) where marijuana products are accompanied by their exact chemical makeup—their precise THC and cannabidiol (CBD) composition—which allows clients to make informed decisions about the nature of the high they want to achieve.
Transparency and safety are not the only factors that improve with legalization; quality does, too, mirroring alcohol. Instead of smoking anything for the high of it, it becomes an activity of connoisseurs, like enjoying a fine wine or a craft beer. Forbes writer Mike Adams tells of his experience seeing legalization in real time. Before the first state legalized it, marijuana “was usually some trash grass from Mexico or some moderately okey-dokey homegrown stuff manufactured by the redneck reefer farmers in the Midwest,” he recalls. “But ever since Colorado and Washington became the first states to go fully legal six years ago, the variety of cannabis products on the black market has improved big time. So much that Mexican drug cartels really don’t even bother trying to sell their subpar brick weed to Americans anymore. Here in southern Indiana, where my journalistic compound is located, we never see Mexican marijuana—only pot smuggled in from places like Colorado, California and Illinois. Occasionally, some decent weed from Kentucky will come across the table, but that’s about as foreign as it gets around here.”
Nowadays, much of the black-market cannabis in states where it is illegal is, thankfully, supplied by the same, high-quality products from the states where it’s legal. The times of smuggled Mexican brick weed are behind us, for the most part. But this revitalization of the marijuana market is just the first step; only nationwide legalization can systematize it for every American.
