David Courtwright: Marijuana Legalization Is Headed for a Political Reckoning
The political debate over marijuana may be nowhere near settled. In a new clip from High Stakes, historian and addiction…
The political debate over marijuana may be nowhere near settled.
In a new clip from High Stakes, historian and addiction expert David Courtwright predicts that the growing public-health consequences of marijuana commercialization will eventually force the issue back into the center of American politics.
“Sooner or later this is going to become a major political issue,” Courtwright tells Dr. Kevin Sabet, pointing to emerging emergency-room consequences and a marijuana market increasingly focused on making products more potent and appealing. The side effects of psychoactive drugs, he argues, inevitably reassert themselves as public-health concerns—and marijuana will be no exception.
Sabet says the coming debate does not have to mean returning to an era of mass criminalization. Instead, he argues policymakers have been sold a false choice between locking people up for marijuana offenses and allowing mass commercialization. “We don’t want to go towards either extreme,” Sabet says.
The exchange gets at one of the central arguments of the new High Stakes episode: drug policy often moves in cycles, but once powerful commercial interests become invested in selling an addictive product, changing course becomes much harder.
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