Tag: Colorado

“Burying the lede”: heavy cannabis use in Colorado

“Burying the lede” is what journalism teachers call it when the key fact in a story doesn’t make it to the first (“lede”) paragraph but instead gets “buried” somewhere down in the story.

Of course, scientists can make the same mistake: breathlessly reporting routine findings while ignoring what’s surprising or important. Consider, for example, this week’s report from the Colorado Retail Marijuana Public Health Advisory Committee. The authors report relatively encouraging news about the public-health impacts of legalization: cannabis use among adults and minors is high relative to other states, but there’s no observable increase after the opening of retail adult-use stores. The spike of emergency department visits due to edibles seems to have come back to earth.

But neither the report itself, nor the news stories I’ve seen about it, makes much of a fuss about what looks to me like the headline finding: (from p. 4 of the report):

In 2015, 6% of adults reported using marijuana daily or near-daily. This was lower than daily or near-daily
alcohol (22%) or tobacco use (16%). Of 18- to 25-year old marijuana users, 50% report using daily
or near-daily (13% of all 18- to 25-year olds). Among adult past-month marijuana users, 79% smoke, 30%
“vape” and 33% use edibles. Respondents could report using more than one method, which 50% of users
did. Finally, approximately 2% of adults drove a vehicle in the past 30 days after using marijuana.

In case you didn’t notice it: 50% of cannabis users between 18 and 25 use every day or almost every day. (The report defines “daily or near-daily use” as self-reported us 5 to 7 days per week.) We know from other studies by Beau Kilmer and his group at RAND that daily/near-daily smokers consume about three times as much cannabis per use-day as less frequent smokers, enough to be measurably impaired (even if not subjectively stoned) for most of their waking hours. That turns out to be 13% of the entire population of young adults. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health finds that about one-half of daily or near-daily smokers meet the diagnostic criteria for Substance Use Disorder. That’s a frightening share of users, and of the total population, to be engaging in such worrisome behavior.

The comparison with daily use of alcohol and tobacco seems vaguely reassuring: daily cannabis use is less common than daily use of the two others drugs. But that’s a false reassurance, because the behaviors aren’t directly comparable. Tobacco, of course, isn’t an intoxicant at all. Alcohol certainly is, but as sociological (not pharmacological) fact most drinking activity is not to the point of intoxication: most people who have a drink or two, even every day, just have a drink or two: they don’t intend to get drunk, and they don’t in fact get drunk. The scientific literature has a technical term for getting drunk: it’s called “binge drinking,” and is usually defined as four or more drinks at a sitting for a woman, five or more for a man (to allow for gender differences in weight). Binge drinking is a hell of a lot more common than you’d like it to be: about half of all drinks are consumed as part of drinking binges. But it’s still relatively rare.

Cannabis, by contrast - again, this is sociology, not pharmacology - is, under U.S. conditions and practices, usually used to intoxication, as the common terms indicate: “getting medicated,” “getting stoned,” “getting wrecked.” Yes, it’s possible to take a puff or two before a dinner or a concert, or at a party, to enhance the enjoyment of food, music, and companionship, but that’s not in fact the way U.S. consumers typically take the herb. Of course, some of those daily and near-daily users aren’t getting stoned every time they use; their tolerance for THC has developed to the point where smoking just makes them feel normal. Unfortunately, all the studies show that objective impairment - reduced performance on a range of cognitive and motor tasks - can be present even when subjective intoxication is absent, and in fact impairment generally lasts longer than the feeling of being high.

And yet the prevalence of heavy use doesn’t even make it to the report’s list of “trends to continue monitoring” (i.e., things to worry about), and doing something to bring that prevalence down fails to make the list of recommendations.

More and more people using cannabis more and more often is a trend that pre-dates legalization and is not restricted to states that have legalized. Between 1992 and 2014, as Jon Caulkins calculated, the share of cannabis users who are daily or near-daily more than quadrupled nationally, from 9% to 40%. It’s not clear how much Colorado’s retail non-medical legalization in 2012, or the establishment of retail medical outlets in 2009, or legalization for medical use in 2000, influenced the current prevalence there.

What is clear is that lower prices (Colorado retail bud is now down to about $6/gram and headed lower) and aggressive marketing - both accompaniments of cannabis legalization as it’s currently being pursued, though not of alternative legalization proposals - make it easier for users to slip into heavy daily use. Indeed, that’s the main - some of us would say the only significant - risk of legalization. That risk could be reduced by using taxes to prevent the price collapse  So a report on the effects of legalization that neglects heavy use is like a review of the last performance of “Our American Cousin” that doesn’t mention John Wilkes Booth.

 

 

 

How is legalized pot doing in Colorado?

So far, so good. Was it a good idea? Ask me in 10 years.

Vox tries to cut through the clutter of conflicting claims about the outcomes, so far, of commrcial cannabis availability in Colorado.

So far, the only thing I see that counts as a downside surprise is the problem of misuse of edibles: little children getting into Mommy’s cannabis-laced candies and winding up in the emergency room, older kids bringing those same candies to school, and grown-ups (plus, of course, aging juveniles like Maureen Dowd) getting way, way too stoned and experiencing a very unpleasant few hours.

The problem wasn’t unexpected, in that it’s obvious that sweets are attractive to children and it’s been known for years that the “overdose” risk is higher when the latency between ingestion and feeling the effects is very long. The surprise is that edibles seem to be grabbing a very large market share, and that - for reasons unknown to me - the promised rules about dosage labeling (which could make edibles actually safer than inhaled versions once consumers learn to manage their intoxication levels) weren’t in place when the stores opened.

There has been one undoubted disaster: Levy Thomba, a 19-year-old Congolese student at a college in Wyoming, came to Denver on spring break, bought a high-dose cookie, and (apparently despite a warning issued by the retail clerk) ate the whole thing. He then jumped or fell from a balcony to his death.

That ought to - but of course won’t - silence the pot advocates who argue that “No one has ever died from taking cannabis.” Accidents are a statistically predictable consequence of any sort of intoxication, and inevitably some of those accidents will be fatal. So one identified death doesn’t count as a surprise.

In response to a reporter’s query, I looked up the comparable statistics for our primary legal intoxicant, alcohol. CDCR reports 7500 deaths per year due to alcohol-related falls (out of a total of almost 50,000 acute alcohol deaths per year, in addition to another 40,000 alcohol-related deaths from chronic disease).

Now, Colorado has 1.6% of the population of the U.S. So, assuming the rate of alcohol-induced fatal falls in Colorado is typical, in the five months since Colorado legalized commercial cannabis sales something like .016 x 7500 x 5/12 = 50 Coloradans have died from falling while drunk. So if Levy Thomba is the worst the advocates of legal availability have to show, I’d advise them to pack up their traps and go home.

On the other hand, very few of the likely bad results from cannabis legalization - all of which come down to an increasing number of adolescent and adult problem users - were ever likely to show up immediately after commercial availability began, especially in a state such as Colorado which has had virtual legalization under the “medical marijuana” mask for years. The problems to look out for will show up - if they show up - slowly, not quickly. We’ll get some indications within the first couple of years on the key question whether cannabis substitutes for alcohol or instead complements it, but even that result might not be the same in the long run as it is in the short run.

So while I laugh at the drug warriors’ desperate attempts to portray Colorado as a disaster area, the pot advocates’ blithe assurances that everything is fine remind me of the guy who jumped off the observation deck of Empire State Building. As he passed the 42nd floor on his way down, someone yelled out to him, “How’s it going?” to which he replied, “So far, so good.”

Cannabis taxes will wind up too low, not too high

The big threat to cannabis legalization isnt high taxes; it’s low taxes and loose regulation.

Legal cannabis will naturally be much, much cheaper than illegal cannabis. A joint is the same sort of item as a teabag: the dried flowers of a plant in a wrapper. A fancy teabag costs a dime at the supermarket; the marijuana in an average joint costs about $4 (0.4 gram of sinsemilla flowers @ $10/gram) on the current illicit and quasi-medical markets. The combination of not having to worry about law enforcement and the economies of mass production will inevitably drive the joint price down close to the teabag price. (Generic tobacco cigarettes can be manufactured for about two cents each; the remainder of the price is marketing expense, quasi-rent on brand names, and taxes.)

Now that the federal government has made it clear that state-licensed production in Washington and Colorado will mostly get a pass from federal law enforcement, and now that Washington has decided to allow outdoor growing, avoiding the production bottleneck that might have resulted from the lags in local land-use approval for growing facilities, I’d expect to see much lower-than-current prices in Washington State’s commercial stores no later than next fall. (If I had been running things, I would have started with lower tax rates to speed the transition to the legal market, and then raised taxes to offset the fall in market prices, but the tax rates were in the legislation the voters passed.)

Even at current prices, cannabis is a remarkably cheap intoxicant. A  drinker who hasn’t built up a tolerance might need about $5 worth of mass-market beer to get sloshed; a similarly fresh cannabis smoker could float away on half a normal joint: call it $2 worth. Colorado medical dispensaries already offer their “weekly special” strains of sinsemilla at $5/gm., with volume discounts, and vaporization seems likely to lower the effective cost substantially.  Anyone who’s worried about the price of cannabis is spending far too much time stoned.

Taxation, even if it is very heavy on ad valorem (percentage-of-price) basis, won’t change that picture much; Washington state will collect something like 40% of total retail prices in tax, but 40% of “damned near free” isn’t very much. Colorado’s taxes will be even lower.

The illicit markets may start out with a price advantage over taxed and regulated commercial markets for a year or two. Even then, the quality/reliability/ legality advantages enjoyed by the legal stores would be expected to quickly push the illicit business to the margins, as legal alcohol has done with moonshining. That will be especially true if the states that legalize make a vigorous law-enforcement push against purely illicit activity.

The untaxed and (in Washington State) unregulated quasi-medical markets may also enjoy a price advantage; if people with medical recommendations can buy their cannabis tax-free, we should expect a certain amount of arbitrage. How best to rein in the out-of-control medical-recommendation systems is a challenge that Washington and Colorado (and California, which hasn’t legalized for non-medical use but which has more “medical marijuana” outlets than it has Starbucks) will confront over the coming months and years.

So the biggest worry about legalize cannabis would be a big upsurge in heavy use, and that worry would be exacerbated to the extent that the growth in heavy use is among juveniles. (Provision to minors is by definition illegal, but, as with alcohol, it seems unlikely to generate a distinct illicit market; younger smokers who can’t buy in the stores will be supplied by older siblings, older friends, their parents’ supplies at home, and straw purchasers.

How big that problem turns out to be depends in part on unknowns and in part on policy choices. If cannabis prices are allowed to fall to something like their free-market levels, a very large increase in heavy use would be the likely result. Preventing that will require heavy specific-excise taxation (perhaps on a per-milligram-of-THC basis) and enough enforcement to prevent the evasion of that tax.

The other approach to limiting the increase in heavy use and use by minors would be on the information side: limits on marketing, required vendor training, aggressive consumer information both at point of sale and in the community.

Naturally, true-believing libertarians insist that cannabis legalization be done in the way likely to generate bad outcomes. Taxes BAD! Regulations BAD! “Commercial speech” is SACRED! The free market FOREVER! And of course drug abuse is a merely imaginary problem, so cannabis is just an ordinary commodity that the market will handle perfectly.

It’s possible that they’ll get their way, and that as a consequence the results of cannabis legalization will be just about as bad as the drug warriors keep predicting: the reproduction of our very bad, no good, awful alcohol markets. It’s barely possible - this is what my drug-warrior friends hope - that the results will be so awful that the voters shy away from legalization altogether.

Jacob Sullum has elevated the temporary risk that relatively high taxes starting will slow down the migration from the illicit to the licit market into an existential threat to the legalization project, and is more or less encouraging Colorado pot fans to double-cross the rest of the voters by rejecting the taxes that were the premise of last year’s legalization push. “From a consumer’s perspective, something has gone terribly wrong if legal marijuana prices do not end up being substantially lower than black-market prices.” That’s true, if by “consumer” you mean someone who smokes multiple joints per day. For anyone else, the cost of weed is way down in the rounding error of a personal budget; a weekly smoker might now be paying something like $100 per year for cannabis, even at current prices.

Andrew Sullivan seems to take this seriously. Talk about solving the wrong problem!