The beginning of the end of illegal weed is here.
On May 16 the Justice Department formally moved to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act to Schedule III. This move will not affect the legality of recreational use and sales on the federal level. It is, however, the biggest step yet toward abolishing the legal fiction that cannabis is as dangerous as heroin. And it puts marijuana — used more than any other illicit drug in the world — on a pathway for fully legal recreational use, which a majority of Americans support.
Nothing short of full legalization will end the injustice that leads to hundreds of thousands of arrests annually for marijuana offenses and leaves millions of people of color disproportionately scarred by criminalization.
But the recent move will ease research, permit sellers in states that have legalized to deduct business expenses on their federal taxes and allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate medical marijuana if it chooses to do so. It also offers an opportunity to start ironing out the details of what federal cannabis oversight ought to look like if the time comes — both to redress past harms and protect public health. Effective regulation requires balancing opposing risks to reduce the harm we’ve seen caused by dangerous black-market products while preventing misleading marketing from promoting excessive use.
Learning from the experiences of states that have legalized marijuana is essential. For one, they have not seen the much-feared explosion of youth use. An April 2024 study in JAMA Psychiatry analyzed survey data from 1993 to 2021 and found that teen cannabis use was no more common in the 24 states that legalized adult recreational use than elsewhere. According to a systematic review published in 2022, 10 earlier studies found increases in adolescent use, but 10 others showed no effect, and two showed reductions.
Other drug use didn’t increase, either. Use of the deadliest drugs — opioids — dropped significantly among youth as marijuana legalization spread. Prescription opioid misuse by 12th graders fell from 9.5 percent in 2004 to 1 percent in 2023; heroin use declined similarly. Most states showed little change or even a decline in opioid misuse and overdoses after passage of recreational or medical marijuana laws. And legalized cannabis products have not been linked to fatal poisonings or injuries. (Deaths linked to lung injuries from vape pens seem to have been caused by illegal products and tended to be less common in legal states.)
Legalization isn’t without risks, of course. Some studies show that it increases stoned driving, with one linking a 16 percent rise in fatalities with recreational legalization. Others, however, find no effects or even a reduction, due perhaps to people using cannabis instead of alcohol. And some studies have associated marijuana with psychosis in some populations, but there has been no spike in psychotic disorders in legalized states, as evidenced by a recent study of medical records in 64 million Americans age 16 or older.
Bottom line: The most dire predictions about legalizing marijuana have not been borne out at the state level, which bodes well for federal legalization.
One serious issue that federal regulation is needed to resolve is the persistence of the black market. Historically, West Coast states have supplied most of the domestically grown cannabis in the United States. Since federal law bars interstate sales, Western markets are oversupplied with cannabis, keeping prices low. This makes it difficult for growers to profit without diverting some cannabis to the illegal market. Individual state licensing policies have also inadvertently protected black markets: New York, for example, is now flooded with illegal weed stores because it was slow in licensing legal ones.
Experience with regulation of other substances could guide the creation of federal marijuana policy. One key finding from alcohol and tobacco research is that price matters. Taxes that elevate prices reduce youth use and lower consumption by those who have substance use disorders, in part because the heaviest users pay the most. But to be effective, taxes on marijuana must target potency and not just quantity — and may have to be adjusted regularly to deal with introductions of products with varied strengths. Regulators need to find sweet spots where prices are low enough to minimize illicit sales but high enough to discourage overconsumption.
Federal oversight also matters in managing the relative risks associated with psychoactive substances. Marijuana is generally less harmful than alcohol, tobacco and opioids — and if consumers are incentivized through pricing and regulation, some can be nudged into picking the less dangerous high. But when relative risks are ignored, disaster can strike: Cutting the supply of medical opioids pushed many people who were misusing them onto far more dangerous street drugs, and overdose death rates more than doubled.
The government can further curb risky behavior by putting controls on advertising. The opioid crisis has shown that current restrictions on pharmaceutical promotion are too lax. Alcohol and tobacco products are also too freely marketed. It would make little sense to hold marijuana alone to a higher standard, given that these other products can do more harm than cannabis does. Instead, marketing for all these substances should be far more restricted, if not banned entirely.
Regulators should also pay particularly close attention to potent new cannabis products, which some states allow without much oversight. Stronger products are more likely to be addictive and therefore pose a greater hazard to health. Protecting consumers requires finding a way to regulate these substances that isn’t as arduous and expensive as F.D.A. approval for pharmaceuticals but controls quality and minimizes harmful exposures.
On May 1 the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, reintroduced a bill that would end federal criminalization of the drug, expunge certain marijuana-related offenses and create a framework for regulating recreational-use products.
Though the bill is unlikely to pass Congress this term, the current clash between federal and state policies is not sustainable — all while public support for change remains strong. To move forward, we must find a middle ground between inundating children with marijuana advertisements and incarcerating people for smoking or selling weed. The Biden administration has taken only the first step.
Maia Szalavitz (@maiasz) is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction Is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction.”
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