Tag: Sullivan

Paternalism and pot policy

Legalizing drugs tempts people into drug abuse. Banning them tempts people with drug dealing.

Andrew Sullivan points to arguments by Rod Dreher and David Frum that cannabis legalization would benefit mostly middle-class moderate users at the expense of mostly poor heavy users.

Sullivan is horrified by the frank paternalism involved, but horror isn’t a criticism, and he’s wrong to attribute to Frum and Dreher the notion that “all American adults are basically children that we have to protect from their own choices.” What Frum and Dreher are saying is that some Americans - many of them minors - are indeed in need of protection from their own bad choices. (Dreher is especially clear-minded in pointing out that the need for paternalistic protection varies not just from person to person but from choice to choice: lots of people are capable of managing their diets but not their retirement financial planning. I, for example, want paternalistic protection against being sold adulterated drugs or contaminated food.) There’s no logical flaw in the idea that more-liberal policies in a variety of domains might serve the interests of those better-placed to make good choices at the expense of those worse-placed.

That said, it seems to me that Frum and Dreher do only half of the analysis. They consider the consumer side of the drug market (even then, ignoring the costs inflicted, mostly on poor folks, by 800,000 possession arrests per year), but not the producer side.
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Thirteen theses on cannabis policy

A few facts, and many unknowns, for Frum, Riggs, and Sullivan to chew on (or smoke).

Rather than getting into the cultural or media criticism of the Frum-Riggs-Frum-Sullivan fracas over cannabis policy, perhaps it makes more sense to try to separate out the knowns and identify the unknowns. Experts on the question see open questions where passionate amateurs are most dogmatic about the answers.

1. Cannabis dependency is rarely as bad as severe alcoholism, but it can be plenty bad enough, and it isn’t very rare, especially among those who start – as most users now do – in their middle teens. (A sixteeen-year-old who goes beyond experimentation has about one chance in six of winding up a heavy daily user for a period of months or years.)

2. Most users – and even many frequent users – don’t go on to diagnosable abuse or dependency. There is little evidence of lasting damage from use that isn’t both heavy and chronic. It would be a mistake to attribute all of the suffering of even the heavy, chronic users to cannabis, as opposed to the social circumstances and personal traits that lead them to acquire and maintain the habit. But it would be equally a mistake to ignore their self-reports that cannabis is a source of trouble in their lives.

3. For the non-abusing majority of users, cannabis is a fairly harmless pleasure. For some of them, cannabis use lastingly enhances their lives by broadening their range of experience, deepening their appreciation of the arts, and enhancing their creativity by teaching them a new way of thinking. Very little is known about these phenomena in any systematic way, partly because the science is hard and partly because of the constraints and incentives that influence research.
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