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As the option to legalize marijuana in Wisconsin through the budget looms close, State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos speaks for Republican legislators, adopting an anti-progress stance repeating worn-out fear mongering arguments.
Vos will not support marijuana reform through the budget, he announced on Thursday, Jan. 28. Despite the fact that a bipartisan supermajority of voters chose to support the adoption of recreational marijuana when the question was asked as an advisory referendum in 2018, Vos chose to go against the will of the people. “I am still trying to find a way to [legalize medical marijuana] so that people accept the fact that we are not going to legalize recreational marijuana,” Vos declared.
Vos’s professed support of medical marijuana could seem enthusiastic, as he was recorded saying, “I am open to that idea, [...] I’ve told people before. I supported it, I have been as public as I can be; I think I was one of the first legislators in the Capitol saying I am open to that idea.” To a casual observer, this could be interpreted to mean that Vos supports marijuana reform, which is questionable. In an October 2019 interview, his stance was made clearer. When asked if he’d support a bipartisan bill to legalize medical marijuana, he answered, “No.”
Despite the bill in question being quite restrictive compared to what has become the norm in states that have enacted cannabis reform, Robin Vos and his cohorts found it “way too broad.” If any form of medical marijuana is adopted, it should be a “very limited version” that cannot be smoked or be edible, Vos said; “it should be taken in pill form.” Vos explicitly wants marijuana to be treated and regulated like a prescription painkiller. This undermines one of the key aspects of medical marijuana, which is that it must be easily accessible—often grown at home for free—and out of the hands of traditional medicine providers. Vos on the other hand, is helping Big Pharma make money, rather than helping Wisconsin citizens.
Most egregious is the naive argument surrounding the reason why Vos and Republican lawmakers claim not to support cannabis reform: “I do not think that we have a need to have more drugs in society, especially with the opioid crisis and all the rest,” he claimed. This plays into the 1930s fear-mongering movie, Reefer Madness, that claims that legalizing marijuana would flood the streets with drugs. This relies on a fear that is irrational and has been demonstrated to be false.
To keep marijuana illegal, a huge amount of false propaganda has drilled into Americans’ heads the idea that marijuana is a gateway drug leading to more serious addictions. Thought leaders, both political and religious, have prophesied apocalyptic consequences if marijuana were to be made legal—none of which ever came true in the 35 states that have taken that step.
Anti-pot advocates, such as Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin, hide behind the idea that marijuana is a drug, supposedly like opioids, and that it would add oil to the metaphorical fire of the drug crisis that has been sweeping America.
Legalizing Marijuana Doesn’t Bring More Drugs
The first lie of all is the claim that marijuana legalization significantly increases the amount of marijuana being consumed by the population—in Robin Vos’ words, leads to “have more drugs in society,” with the implication this is a problem to be avoided. Marijuana is already the most popular intoxicating substance by far, alongside alcohol. In its latest national survey on drug use, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found that more than 17.1% of American adults already use cannabis despite the fact it is federally illegal and banned in many states. Among the 18-25 age group, which is consistently the biggest user of marijuana, that number is consistently higher than 30%.
A telling example is California, but this applies to every other state that legalized weed. SAMHSA reports that in California, where legal weed is available and cheap, 40.4% of people ages 18-25 consume it. In Wisconsin, where legal weed is emphatically not available, 32.6% of residents in the same age group consume it with the same frequency. Among the entire adult population, 14.8% of Wisconsinites consume marijuana, and 20.4% of Californians do.
It is important to point out that the rate of marijuana use has been increasing across the board regardless of legalization or the lack thereof. In 2011, half a decade before it would be legalized for adult use in California, and a year before Washington and Colorado kickstarted the legalization movement, 14.1% of Californians reported consuming marijuana. That same year, 9.5% of Wisconsinites did. California’s consumption rates increased by six percentage points; Wisconsin’s increased by five percentage points.
In other words, legalization had a tenuous effect on increased consumption of marijuana—whatever little impact it had is almost certainly attributable to the increased safety of legal marijuana and the reduced risk of legal consequences. Consumption did increase, but it is due to new, more progressive generations freeing themselves from the harmful and objectively wrong belief that marijuana is evil.
If marijuana has one harmful effect, it is a potential stunting effect on developing brains. Marijuana should not be consumed by children, and legalization is the best way to ensure the safety of our children.
SAMHSA data shows clearly that when marijuana becomes legal, its use among people younger than 18 decreases. In California, it went from 17% in 2011 to 15.8% in 2019. In Washington, it went from 16.9% to 16.3%. This is true in all legal states. While rates of use in all other age groups increased, use among youths decreased.
By creating a legal supply chain with oversight and regulations, where a dispensary can be held accountable for selling weed to kids, it makes it easier to control who can access cannabis; drug dealers are not as attentive to respecting the law or morals. Additionally, the quality and safety of legal marijuana is far superior to street-level weed; just like the quality and safety of alcohol improved when it was taken off the hands of the mafia and given to government-regulated producers and retailers, who will ID customers, once Prohibition came to an end.
Last year, a U.S. study found that states that legalized medical marijuana saw a drop—up to 20%—in opioid prescriptions. Most recently, a Canadian study found that introducing marijuana as an alternative to opioids significantly reduces the use of prescription opioids.
Allowing patients (and their caretakers) grow their own medicine for free has become a norm in states with medical marijuana. It is also something that Wisconsin Republicans, Robin Vos first of all, explicitly refuse to support, even when they pretend to support medical marijuana. If medical marijuana were to come to Wisconsin, Vos declared, it would be a “very limited version” in “pill form,” and of course managed by big pharmaceutical corporations.
Legal marijuana—be it recreational or properly implemented medical, both of which Wisconsin Republicans fight against—would seriously cut into the profits of a few powerful health care corporations. The only version of medical marijuana that Republicans defend is the sort that is inefficient, impossible to grow at home, hard to access, expensive and serves the interests of the very same people who manufactured the opioids crisis in the U.S. In other words, Vos and his co-conspirators are voting to protect the profits of the predatory health care industry, even at the cost of countless innocent lives.
Can you guess how much money Robin Vos receives from lobbyists in the health care industry? No, you can’t. Neither can anyone else, because that information is purposefully obfuscated. But even among donors that are not hidden through PACs and party schemes, the health industry remains Vos’ top donor, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
The fact that pharmaceutical companies invest immense sums of money to oppose cannabis reform is a well-documented reality seen both at the state and federal level. “To them, it's competition for chronic pain, and that's outrageous because we don't have the crisis in people who take marijuana for chronic pain having overdose issues,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand decried in support of marijuana legalization. “It's not the same thing. [Marijuana] is not as highly addictive as opioids are. [...] The opioid industry and the drug companies that manufacture it are just trying to sell more drugs that addict patients and addict people across this country.”
Legal marijuana, far from adding “more drugs in society” and worsening the opioid crisis, would actually help alleviate the disastrous effects that legal but harmful substances have had on America. It would offer a safer path to recovery for addicts, and a harmless painkiller rather than addictive opioids to people in need.
If Republicans lawmakers in Wisconsin, who have been blocking the legalization of marijuana by going against the will of the voters, really cared about drug-related deaths, they would seek to legalize weed, and they would do it properly. But that is a big “if.”
Next month in the April Shepherd Express: Marijuana Is Not Opioids, Comparing Them Is Dishonest.
