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Is cannabis addictive?

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Ask this woman.

My dad will never stop smoking pot. Sometimes I wonder about the man he might have been, and the lives we all might have had, if he’d never started.

As I keep saying: the evils of prohibition do not disprove the evils of substance abuse. In the case of cannabis, it’s probable that we could get rid of the former without greatly increasing the latter. But it’s not automatic. And denying that cannabis abuse is a real problem doesn’t help.

Note how the mythology of “addiction” cultivated by the “drug-prevention” effort and the drug-treatment industry interferes with understanding. Most drug abuse is very unlike the horrible picture painted in the linked story: it’s relatively transient. And most people who use “addictive” drugs don’t get addicted to them; substance abuse happens to only a minority of users, and only a minority of abusers actually have the “chronic, relapsing disorder” touted as typical. Bad habits around drug-taking are like other bad habits: they lie along a spectrum, and not everyone who uses a drug that turns out to be habit-forming in others encounters a problem.

But if you have the problem, or your brother, or your son, or your mother, it’s a serious problem. And the risk can’t just be wished away. If you support making cannabis available from profit-seeking commercial vendors, heavily marketed, and cheap - which is the path Washington and Colorado are walking down right now - then the predictable result of your preferred policy will be more people with very bad cannabis habits. And there could be fewer such people if cannabis were kept expensive, if marketing were kept to a minimum, and if users were offered modest helps to their self-command, such as user-set periodic purchase quotas, or if we keep the commercial motive out of the business altogether with state stores or by limiting vendor licenses to consumer-owned co-ops and not-for-profit businesses with boards concerned with limiting drug abuse rather than maximizing revenue.

Of course you’re free to oppose all of that. But if you do so, you ought at least to acknowlege the inevitable human cost.

h/t Andrew Sullivan

U.S. Marijuana Possession Enforcement Intensity is Down Over 40%

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Future historians of drug policy will appropriately regard the recent legalization of recreational marijuana in Washington and Colorado as a significant reduction in U.S. law enforcement’s role in cannabis regulation. Yet that marijuana enforcement policy shift had been underway for a lot longer than many people realize.

The chart below presents 2007-2012 FBI Uniform Crime Reports data on marijuana possession arrests and National Survey on Drug Use and Health data on aggregate days of American marijuana use*. To put the two lines on the same scale, aggregate days of marijuana use are reported in 10,000s. The most striking feature of the data are that the two lines are going in opposite directions. The net result is a 42% decline in marijuana possession enforcement intensity (i.e., the number of arrests per day of marijuana use).

Americans’ marijuana use went up by almost 50% just from 2007-2012. This sharp increase in the population’s total days of use has been driven less by the increased number of users than by the big increase in the number of individuals using heavily (e.g., smoking every day or nearly every day). That growth in use meant there was a large increase in police opportunities to arrest people for marijuana possession. But marijuana possession arrests have instead been falling as numerous states have passed decriminalization laws (with for the first time in U.S. history, no White House opposition) and/or created loosely-regulated medical marijuana systems.

The data in the chart support at the least three conclusions about marijuana policy:

(1) U.S. Marijuana possession enforcement intensity had become light even prior to the passage of legalization in two states. As of 2012, the average American once-a-week pot smoker would expect to be arrested for possession about once every century. This reality isn’t evident when one focuses just on the number of arrests, or on how arrests compare to some irrelevant standard (e.g., number of arrests per minute or the percentage of all drug arrests that are for marijuana).

Conclusions about how intensely a crime is being policed can only be drawn in the context of information on how often that crime is committed. Six hundred fifty thousand arrests is a big number in the abstract, but relative to over 3 billion days of marijuana use, it’s small. That why the U.S. can have a large absolute number of marijuana possession arrests yet at the same time be policing marijuana at a less vigorous rate than do most developed nations.

(2) There is no evidence of “net-widening” in U.S. marijuana enforcement policy. In some regions, such as New South Wales, Australia, reduction in criminal penalties for marijuana use led to an increase in arrests. Apparently, Australian police officers who previously felt penalties were too tough began feeling comfortable widening their enforcement net to intervene in more cases of marijuana use. This phenomenon has not been replicated in the U.S., where severity of penalties and number of arrests have been falling in tandem.

(3) Changes in official marijuana policy are often a formalization of what has already been evolving on the ground. The creation of recreational marijuana markets in Washington and Colorado (with some other states likely to follow) is in one sense qualitatively new. Yet it is also the culmination of an established trend of rapidly declining law enforcement involvement in the regulation of marijuana. That’s one reason why it’s often hard for observers to determine whether new drug laws have a unique causal effect or are more a ratification of informal policies that were already in place.

*My thanks to Dr. Beau Kilmer and his team at RAND for providing me with days of use data.

Wish-I’d-Said-That Dep’t

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John McDuling in Quartz: “Investing in marijuana stocks is a lot more dangerous than smoking marijuana.”

There is a ton of money to be made in the cannabis business: by fleecing investors.

There’s also a ton of money to be lost: by being one of those investors.

Legal cannabis will be a commodity, and a cheap one at that. Maybe somebody has a clever branding strategy to make money anyway, but what are the odds you’re going to pick that lucky company to invest in as opposed to the 99 others that are going to go broke when pre-tax retail prices hit $3/gm. for sinse, with concentrates trading at a discount on a per-milligram-THC basis?

This is one case where the old rule applies in spades. The sure-fire way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.

Beau Kilmer on restricting cannabis marketing

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Beau Kilmer has a very sharp short op-ed in the NYT arguing for the use of federal muscle to limit aggressive cannabis marketing and child-friendly packaging in Colorado and Washington. Going after sellers of cannabis candy seems like clearly good idea, given the risk of accidental consumption by little children. Would it really be too great an imposition to insist that cannabis edibles and potables be unsweetened and not look like confections? Since the Supreme Court’s “commercial free speech” doctrine is based on making truthful claims about lawful products, and since cannabis remains an unlawful product at the federal level, I don’t see the basis for claiming that the legalizing states and the federal government have to permit the same sort of unscrupulous advertising for cannabis as they do for alcohol.

Cannabis legalization and the empirical-minded median voter

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No big surprises from the cannabis questions in the latest CNN-ORC poll. It looks as if the Gallup numbers from earlier in the year (58 for legalization, 39 against) were a bit of an outlier; the gap seems to be nearer 10 points than 20, which makes a difference. But the CNN-ORC findings, along with those from the Pew survey, confirm the decisive shift in public opinion. Support for legalization now has a clear majority. Most interesting finding, to my eyes: the new poll asked the question two ways:

“Do you think the use of marijuana should be made legal, or not?”

“Do you think the sale of marijuana should be made legal, or not?”

The answers were virtually identical: 55/44 for legal use, 54/45 for legal sale. So for those of us who have wondering whether the “use” question was inappropriately lumping supporters of decriminalization with supporters of full commercial availability, the answer is “No.” A majority really favors full legalization. On the other hand, when the question gets specific, the majority disappears:

“As you may know, Colorado now allows anyone over the age of 21 to purchase small quantities of marijuana for their own use from businesses that have been licensed by the state government to sell marijuana. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea, or do you want to see what happens in Colorado and other states that legalize marijuana before you decide how you feel about this matter?”   

“Good idea” leads “bad idea” by a small plurality, 33/27, but the largest group (37%) wants to wait and see.  Yes, of course phrasing the question that way encouraged the wait-and-see answer, but it’s encouraging that so many voters are empirically-minded on this issue rather than fixed in one of two fact-proof ideological camps.

Even among those who oppose legal pot, most prefer to have users pay fines rather than going to jail. And support for medical marijuana is overwhelming: 88/10.

All of this suggests that those who oppose legalization have chosen a grossly inappropriate strategy, if their objective is winning as oppposed to mere fundraising and personal advancement. Moral denunciation, opposition to medical research (with actual cannabis, not hypothetical individual molecules), and support for user penalties are all losing moves. Instead of simply posing  their own prejudices and certainties against those of the legalizers, they ought to offer cautious experimentalism. The median voter might buy “Wait and see,” if it appeared sincere. But she’s way past “No, nay, never!”

Footnote Logically, of course, “Wait and see” isn’t a clear pragmatic implication of uncertainty. Waiting also has costs. The right conclusion is “Make cautious changes that are easy to modify in the light of new evidence, and watch for that evidence.” The big problem for the “No” side is that if there are going to be large bad consequences from legalization, they will likely develop over years, not months.

Cannabis retail licenses: lotteries v. auctions

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Washington State has more applicants for pot-shop licenses than it has licenses to hand out. So the plan is to cull the ineligible applications and then have a lottery.

A lottery is “fair” in some primitive sense - it avoids charges of favoritism - but it has no other virtue. It simply creates windfall winners and losers. Why not auction the licenses (on, say, a five-years-at-a-time basis) and capture the windfall for the state?

The next hard problem facing  the Liquor Board will be how to allocate the limited square footage of grow space. Again, I’d opt for an auction.

Footnote Bob Young quotes me accurately, but slightly out of context. When I said “What if we gave a pot legalization and nobody came?” I was worried about whether the retail stores would have anything to sell in the first year at prices competitive with the  illicit market and with the medical outlets. The decision to allow outdoor growing will, I think, make that problem go away quickly, and hasten the problem of prices low enough to encourage drug abuse, use by minors, and diversion from legal retail sale for out-of-state distribution.

Second footnote No, I’m not currently an active adviser to the Washington State process. BOTEC has completed all its assigned tasks.

How to legalize cannabis

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With a little help (ok, actually quite a lot of help) from my friends Lowry Heussler, Jon Caulkins, Keith Humphreys, and Beau Kilmer, and my sister Kelly, I produced an op-ed for the Financial Times on the design of a post-prohibition cannabis control regime.

Here’s the punchline:

A large increase in problem use might be a price worth paying to rid ourselves of the many ills attendant on prohibition. But it is not a price we have to pay. Smarter policies could lead to better outcomes.

Many thanks to Kesewa Hennessy, Deputy Comment Editor at the FT, for a superb job of copy-editing.

One key point, omitted to save space: the system of user-set quotas proposed for cannabis could also apply - should, in my view, be applied - to alcohol and gambling.

Want to Save Pubs?: Support Minimum Unit Pricing of Alcohol

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13jour600.1The Economist is among the world’s indispensable newspapers, but it has a University of Chicago-style blind spot concerning any restrictions on psychoactive drugs. I therefore generally regard it as an endearing British relative who has one annoying quirk, but now I can be unambivalent in my affection: The Economist has endorsed minimum unit pricing of alcohol.

I describe the policy in detail here, but the gist is that regulators set a floor under the price of alcohol. The Economist describes this as a “windfall” for producers and retailers but this is not correct: The increase in price lowers volume of sales to the point that it’s a wash for sellers (fewer sales, but higher profit per sale). The true windfall goes to the public, who benefit from decreased deaths, accidents, crimes and emergency room visits.

Minimum pricing is also, as a member of the UK Parliament and I pointed out in submitted evidence, exactly what the ailing UK pub industry needs to get back on its feet. Some critics of minimum pricing howl that “responsible pub drinkers should not have to pay for the damage of boozing by violent yobs”. This is completely wrong-headed, because alcohol prices in pubs are already far above even the highest proposed minimum price. Minimum pricing is directed at rock-bottom price sales of alcohol in supermarkets, which are killing the pubs by undercutting the price of their number one product.

Pub-goers who are losing their beloved watering holes are thus suffering not from minimum pricing, but from a lack of it. Andrew Sullivan laments, as I do, the decline of British pubs, but his series of posts on the topic has not highlighted how Tesco and similar supermarket chains have hurt pubs by flogging high strength, low cost alcohol. Sullivan passed along the claim that anti-smoking legislation is one cause of pubs’ declining fortunes, which sounds like tobacco industry propaganda and has been empirically disproven. The return of customers who don’t like tobacco smoke isn’t hurting pubs; alcohol being sold at ultra-low prices by competitors who can make up the lost revenue on other products is.

Gander, meet goose: cannabis and football

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Question for David Brooks, Ruth Marcus, Joe Scarborough, and other opponents of cannabis legalization:

It seems likely that very heavy cannabis use starting in adolescence and continuing for many years can lead to measurable decreases in some cognitive abilities. It is possible that occasional use might also cause damage, but right now there’s no strong evidence to back that claim.

On the other hand, it is certain that participation in high school and college football leads predictably to brain damage.

So: If cognitive harm from cannabis is a good reason to support continued criminalization, would you support a ban on high school and college football? And if not, why not?