People wonder why people use herb, but...
herb is a very spiritual plant, you know.
Cannabis is by far the most popular illegal drug in the world.
The plant has been consumed for medicine, spiritual enlightenment,
and plain old relaxation for thousands of years
and has become a ubiquitous part of international culture.
By most measures,
it’s also considerably safer than many legal drugs,
including alcohol.
Cannabis legalization is probably inevitable,
and it should be.
The current system is failing.
But there are pitfalls
and complexities involved in that process.
We have to get legalization right.
And in this episode, we’re looking at exactly that,
how to legalize and regulate weed in the best ways possible.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[The Right Way To Legalize Cannabis]
The war on drugs has failed with cannabis
in similar ways it’s failed with every other drug.
If you go back 100 years to how we got into a war on drugs at all,
it had almost nothing to do with the substance itself.
And it was always enforcement. It was punitive.
Fast forward to 1937,
marijuana, that was a combination of people in the US Southwest
concerned about Mexicans.
And, hey, they use marijuana, so let’s do that.
Millions of lives have been ruined by cannabis enforcement.
Billions of dollars have been accumulated by organized crime.
And the relatively few people who have suffered adverse reactions to it
have often been unable to receive the help they need.
Meanwhile, despite being illegal throughout most of the world,
weed is now more popular than ever
and more socially accepted as a part of many people’s daily lives.
Fifty-two percent of Americans have tried it at least once,
and one in ten Europeans report using it in the past year.
Canada and many states in the US have now legalized cannabis
for both medical and recreational use.
The idea of cannabis legalization
can bring out some very strong opinions in people.
Opponents freak out that it will spell the end of civilization,
while advocates claim it’s the magic bullet
that will cure all of society’s problems.
Obviously, both of these extremes are a bit silly.
In 2018, Canada became the first major world economy
to fully legalize and regulate cannabis,
following on from several states across the US.
Justin Trudeau won support from Canadian voters
by focusing on cannabis legalization as a public health issue,
a way to remove the market from criminals.
If you’re decriminalizing possession,
but you’re not creating a legal framework for producing it,
then it’s still going to be organized crime
controlling the sale of marijuana.
We don’t want that.
We want to get the profits out of there.
We want to make sure that we’re protecting underage Canadians
from being able to purchase marijuana.
This is the essential logic behind almost all legalization.
But thanks to the war on drugs,
criminals have been making a lot of money off selling weed
for a long time.
And they’re not just going to give that market up overnight.
The market is owned by certain people, certain groups.
I dealt with those people.
Who were those groups?
Groups... Bad people, if you want to know. Bad people.
They’re the ones who control almost everything
that has to do with drugs.
Cannabis, drugs,
anything that’s drug-related, whatever, whatnot.
Everybody knows that if you’re in that business, to a certain extent,
these are the people you’re dealing with.
And now legalization is coming, eventually.
Do you think it’ll affect organized crime’s stronghold?
It will, but it’ll take years.
There has been some criticisms of the reforms in Canada
that there is still a significant illegal market there.
Two years in, less than 50 per cent of the market
is legally regulated and taxed.
Fifty percent legal, regulated, and taxed is better than
100 percent illegal, completely unregulated, and completely untaxed.
But we are still in the rollout phase,
and this is something that is going to take a number of years
before a more long-term equilibrium is established.
But while the legal market inevitably takes a while to establish itself,
we should also acknowledge one pretty important fact.
Contrary to what many drug warriors predicted,
places like Canada and Colorado
have not descended into postapocalyptic zombie wastelands
because a few legal weed shops have opened.
There's been no sharp increase in road accidents,
other forms of criminality, or mental illness.
One of the main bits of fearmongering
that opponents of cannabis regulation like to scare people with
is that if you legalize weed,
there’ll be a sudden explosion in its popularity.
But when we look at the evidence, this simply hasn't happened.
There's no explosion of use.
If anything, youth use has stayed level,
or in some places gone down.
Adult use tracked up a little bit immediately after legalization
but then came down again a bit.
There hasn't been any particularly significant changes at all.
But then in Canada, cannabis was pretty easily available anyway.
But there’s always this assumption
by some people in the legalization debate
that when cannabis is illegal, it’s very hard to get,
and if you legalized it, it would suddenly be incredibly easy to get.
And that's just clearly not true.
While overall use hasn’t exploded in legal markets,
regulation does seem to allow better control over who is buying
and using weed.
If you’re not old enough to go to the stores,
but there is less illegal cannabis available,
then yes, availability will go down.
But given that that’s one of the things
that legalization regulation is trying to achieve,
that's actually a good thing.
This is really crucial.
One of the biggest worries around cannabis
is the potential effects of heavy use on mental health,
particularly for young people, as their brains are still developing.
However, while heavy use of high potency cannabis by young people
is considered a risk indicator for conditions such as psychosis,
and daily use of any drug, including alcohol, can be dangerous,
the extent to which cannabis directly causes mental health disorders
has yet to be established.
But the important factor here is that
as youth consumption hasn’t gone up where weed has been legalized,
there’s every indication that a regulated market
is a way of protecting young people’s mental health,
not endangering it.
The cannabis plant is a remarkable plant.
It contains many hundreds of different chemicals.
But the main two components are THC, which get you stoned,
and CBD, which is a kind of antidote to THC,
which protects against the excessive stoning.
It protects against the paranoia of THC.
Policy of driving all cannabis production to the black market
has led to people growing forms of cannabis
which are very, very strong in THC.
And that has led to a greater rise of particularly psychotic symptoms
produced by strong THC forms of skunk, like paranoia,
and also a greater aggravation of people
with ongoing psychotic problems.
Now, if we had a a regulated market, the first thing that would happen
is that people would know what they were getting.
And the second, we could use taxation and pricing
to encourage people to use the mixture
and so get the beneficial effects of the CBD
alongside the recreational effects of the THC.
Back in the 1930s, we learned the hard way
that trying to ban alcohol simply doesn’t work.
So we came up with a system to regulate it
with strength limits on drinks
and licensed bars and shops that aren’t allowed to sell to kids.
Obviously, drug dealers on the illicit market
don’t worry about stuff like that
and will sell anything to anyone.
Do you think that kids are subjected to drugs more now?
I’ve seen kids doing them at about 12 years old and that.
Is it because MDMA is cheap for kids like that?
-Yeah. -Yeah, it’s dirt cheap.
But the alcohol and tobacco industries
also leave a lot to be desired,
with huge companies able to lobby governments
to shape policies in their favor.
The process of legalizing cannabis
offers opportunities to vastly improve on that model.
One of the first major concerns
is not just about weed suddenly being sold in fancy shops
but who gets to run those shops.
This is pretty much the archetypal cliché of legal cannabis:
bearded guys with elaborate vape machines
droning on about their favorite strains of kush,
like craft beer geeks but with hazier short-term memories.
But in reality, it’s not the nerdy cannabis enthusiasts
who are actually running the show.
The legal market in Canada, as in many states across the US,
has actually been captured by a few giant companies
riding the so-called green wave to increase their share prices.
This isn’t about boujie artisanal edibles.
This is about serious 21st century capitalism.
In preparation for legalization, weed giant Canopy Growth
started banging out a number of smaller producers around Canada,
making it the single largest cannabis company in the country.
Twenty-two million shares traded today.
Wow, that's unbelievable.
It’s been the biggest trading stock
every day in Canada for the last couple of weeks.
Obviously, it’s not a problem in itself
that people make a bunch of money out of cannabis.
People already make serious money out of it.
But there's also the danger of some real injustice here.
First of all,
governments tend to make getting legal cannabis licenses so expensive
that only the big corporate players can actually afford them,
so independents are shut out from the start.
For almost 100 years,
the worst violence and oppression of the war on drugs
has fallen on people of color and marginalized communities.
Now, many jurisdictions ban people with previous convictions
from receiving legal cannabis licenses.
Obviously, that disproportionately excludes many of those same people
who’ve been persecuted for so long,
who are then forced to watch
as a bunch of slick, predominantly white business people
cruise in and make a load of profit off the now legal weed business.
This has led some in the African- American community, in particular,
to try to reclaim the space,
like former NBA star Al Harrington.
Do you feel like the Black community has access to the industry out west?
Hell no.
**** no. They can’t afford it.
It costs so much to even submit an application, you know what I mean?
I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That’s why I had to continue to be an advocate
to try to change some of these laws
and break down some of these barriers.
And we could really uplift our community with this plant.
And this isn't just about the US.
Many of those big cannabis companies
that accumulated huge amounts of capital during the first green wave
have been using that money to take over emerging legal weed markets
across the world.
Jamaica decriminalized cannabis in 2015,
but many there are worried that it’s foreign venture capitalists
who’ll be reaping most of the rewards.
It starts at $2,000 for a license to grow weed
and $10,000 to transport it.
That’s more than the average Jamaican’s annual salary.
Maybe there’s a chance here not just to end the war on drugs
and raise tax revenues
but to actually create some reparations
for those who have been most affected.
Luckily, the patchwork of how different American states
have gone about legalization so far
gives us a wide range of evidence of what works
and what doesn’t.
And in the face of pressure from activists,
some states are actually taking steps to make social equity
a fundamental part of their cannabis legalization agendas.
Not only does legalization prevent
some of the harms of the war on drugs going forward,
but then we use some of the opportunities that it creates
to potentially repair some of the harms
that the war on drugs has created in the past.
We’re seeing more well thought through,
better-funded equity programs.
Illinois, which legalized cannabis relatively recently,
has already expunged half a million former cannabis convictions.
That is a major injustice that has been, to some degree,
rectified by this policy.
We are seeing millions of dollars being redirected
from the legal cannabis economy into social programs.
We are seeing minority-owned cannabis businesses
supported by equity programs in places like Massachusetts.
We have an opportunity with emerging legal markets
to do things differently and to do things better.
The war on drugs has been going on a long time.
Its patterns are set deep,
and the damage it has done is going to take many years to undo.
But what we’ve learned from the experiments taking place
with cannabis legalization across North America
is that the hysterical fearmongering predictions have not come true,
and the results have been broadly positive.
However, as we consider legalization across the rest of the world,
there's also a lot we can learn about how to do things better.
Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol,
and it hasn’t worked with cannabis either.
But we’re now at a crossroads where we don’t simply have to
repeat the mistakes of the alcohol or tobacco industries
and can actually create something more effective, fair, and positive:
a new industry that works for everyone involved.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.