Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation, was recently on Ezra Klein’s podcast The Ezra Klein Show. The Anxious Generation studies the epidemic of teenage mental illness as technology like smartphones and social media become increasingly pervasive in their lives. Excessive usage of these technologies disconnects a teenager from the non-digital world: the real world. That deprivation plus technological hyper-stimulation work together to profoundly harm mental health.
In the podcast episode, the topic of screen time as a social and public health concern was front and center. But a quip made by Ezra shines a light on another issue directly impacting teen mental health, the legalization of marijuana: “I was somebody who was very supportive of marijuana legalization, and I think it’s gone terribly.” Jonathan responded: “Yes, I agree.”
Ezra mentioned marijuana within an exchange about ‘massive deregulation’ in general: deregulation of sports gambling, cryptocurrency (‘crypto as a casino’), and then, marijuana deregulation, a social experiment that has indeed gone terribly. Haidt ties the regulatory laxing of these myriad vices to a lack of ‘friction’:
“Now, what we have lost in a lot of places is friction. And there are things that you want to have some access to, but there would be friction. We had access to things like sports gambling. But you had to drive to Vegas—at least, on the West Coast, where I grew up.
“Taking away all the friction, making it available virtually everywhere and online has just then made it very dangerous to people. Because some percentage of people are going to develop a gambling problem. And we know that pretty well.”
As Ezra’s remark earlier in the discussion implied, sports gambling and marijuana use are analogous in that there was once regulatory ‘friction’ that reined in access to these things, and in turn, prevented people with addictive tendencies from using in the first place and developing a potentially debilitating addiction. With less and less friction to buffer individuals’ access to addictive products, addiction becomes the unhinged, free-market monster that had always been lurking but is only capable of being subdued by the steward that is the government.
Jonathan Haidt’s statement echoes what leaders have been saying for more than a decade regarding marijuana legalization. Ever since Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012, there has been an insidious “movement” to sand down all friction that keeps people away from a drug that is scientifically confirmed to be harmful to one’s mental and physical health.
This is even more insidious because marijuana legalization brands itself as social justice-oriented and grassroots, but is and always has been a corporate project single-mindedly focused on addicting as many people as possible, especially youth, who have vulnerable, developing brains and who stand to be the most loyal customers for the longest time once hooked.
The marijuana industry is doing its level best to prevent us from sharing the truth about marijuana and wants more than anything to remove all friction from the situation and in effect create a perennially duped and drugged society, as if the United States isn’t already narcotized enough.
No. No more.
It is time to say “yes” to friction. Drug policy should prioritize the best function of regulation: to safeguard the well-being of the public. From negative health effects to increased ‘drugged driving’ car crashes, we fight to maintain the friction that keeps us from crashing.
We have our own movement that is much more than anti-drug. Someone once told me to avoid defining stances or movements based on negatives (anti-war, ant-racism, etc.). They subtly avoid the imperative to build a better and especially healthier society, one that is more utopic and freer of vices like marijuana. We share this paradigm with the legalization “movement,” although their vision is altogether the opposite of ours. And we’re definitely OK with that. We are for friction.
Listen to the podcast episode here.
Nethan Reddy is a contractor with Smart Approaches to Marijuana