Should Pennsylvania legalize pot?
There ARE clear public health benefits. But balancing the pros and the cons can get hazy.
Should Pennsylvania legalize pot?
By Jonathan Purtle
Earlier this month, Pennsylvania State Sen. Daylin Leach (D., Montgomery-Delaware) announced plans to introduce a bill that would legalize marijuana — not just for medical purposes, as New Jersey recently did, but also for recreational use. The substance would be regulated by the state in a way similar to alcohol and tobacco. As Leach describes on his website, the bill is founded on the idea that marijuana is no more harmful, and less addictive (this is debatable), than both these substances and that the financial costs of keeping marijuana illegal are enormous. Citing data from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Leach points out that 24,685 marijuana arrests were made in Pennsylvania in 2006 — translating into $325 million in criminal justice costs.
Leach’s proposal follows referendums in Colorado and Washington that recently gave those states the green light for recreational marijuana use. And while the Pennsylvania bill will likely go up in smoke — Gov. Corbett has vowed to veto the bill if it reaches his desk — it seems high time to explore the potential pros and cons of legalizing marijuana from a public health perspective.
First the cons.
Let’s assume that marijuana is 100 percent bad for the mind and body and that legalization would lead to increased consumption. While the notion that marijuana is all harm and no good is debatable — advocates of medical marijuana tout its therapeutic benefits — evidence of its adverse health impacts is strong. A White House document entitled “The Public Health Consequences of Marijuana Legalization” synthesizes some of this research. Outcomes include respiratory problems (smoke is never good for lungs) and cognitive impairment.
The science says that the less marijuana a population consumes the better. But would legalization actually result in more people toking up more often? The answer is hazy. Economists at RAND, the non-partisan think tank, crunched the numbers and concluded that marijuana consumption would probably increase with legalization, but they had little idea how large the increase would be.
Now the pros.
The most clear-cut public health benefits of marijuana legalization would likely result from reductions in incarceration. While there are many ways in which incarceration negatively impacts public health — by disrupting monogamous sexual partnerships, for example, which increases the number of sexual partners that people have, and thus the spread of sexual transmitted diseases — let’s just focus on the financial costs of putting people behind bars for weed. As Senator Leach notes, Pennsylvania taxpayers spend around $325 million annually on marijuana-related arrests. While not all of this goes to incarceration, legalization would free up a lot of public money that could be invested in health.
As described in a previous post, research has documented a link between increases in public health spending and improvements in population health. A large, multisite study found that a 10 percent increase in local public health department spending was associated with a 6.9 percent decrease in infant mortality, a 3.2 percent decrease in deaths from cardiovascular disease, a 1.4 percent decrease in deaths from diabetes, and a 1.1 decrease in deaths from cancer. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s budget would double if the state took $200 million of marijuana-related criminal justice savings and invested it in the city’s health. This would translate into a substantial number of lives saved. Exactly how many? We can only speculate.
Data from the 2010-2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicate that an estimated 10.82 percent of Pennsylvanians over the age of 12 used marijuana in the past month — as did nearly one-third (31.16 percent) of residents between the ages of 18-25. The estimates are similar for New Jersey — 10.73 percent and 31.79 percent, respectively. While uncertainty abounds regarding the public health costs and benefits of legalizing marijuana, one thing is for sure — people are using it, legal or not.
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Well the thing to remember here is that..uh...dude, what was I talking about?— Murrayman- Legalize it, tax it.— 1972bline
- Marijuana is already a controlled substance, therefore users are showing they have no respect for the law and no respect for themselves. We should not be rewarding bad behavaoir. Prosecute and fine.— Bruiser
- Peanuts kill more people a year then pot does!!!!!— cuso20
- For the love of god stop spending Billion$ locking people up for using Marijuana. For the cost of using prisons to curb the public use of Marijuana since 1979 Pennsylvania could have lowered their tax rates across the board.
— Dexter - Booze is legal. Give people who can't drink an alternative-- the diabetics, the people with alcohol allergies, people with liver and kidney problems, etc. Re: smoke, there are many alternatives to smoking marijuana, alternatives that would also produce small businesses and jobs. Let's just stop pretending to guard the morals of the citizens-- we are already rife with booze, prescription pills that dope people, etc. etc. etc. and no one does anything about any of it. It's just so droll.— xkarivalis
- Marijuana is far safer than alcohol and tobacco, yet it remains illegal and its users treated like criminals. C'mon people, wake up!— mystikast
- By reading the comments here, the people have spoken. Quite clearly.— TheLowDown
- Adults should be treated like adults. We need to stop protecting people from themselves and prosecute people who violate the rights of others.— amblereagles
- For all those that advocate legalislation, how would you answer these two questions ?
Would you want your doctor performing life and death surgery on you if you knew he had been smoking weed the night before ?
Would you want school teachers in the classroom with your children if you knew they had been using marijuana the night before or possibly that morning before school ?— candidly - "Would you want your doctor performing life and death surgery on you if you knew he had been drinking alcohol the night before ?
Would you want school teachers in the classroom with your children if you knew they had been using alcohol the night before or possibly that morning before school?" The same argument applies.
Obviously, no one wants their doctor's, pilots, or school teachers smoking weed WHILE they preform their job. But what they do in their free time, off of work, as long as it doesn't affect their job preformance, is none of your concern. Legalize marijuana doesn't make it OK to smoke marijuana while driving or preforming surgery, just like you can't drink or drive, or take a few shots of vodka before you preform open heart surgery.
How are some people so ignorant as to not understand this? Legalizing marijuana doesn't mean you can do it anytime, anywhere! Same things such as alcohol would apply... you have to use your head and THINK sometimes. It helps!— mystikast - Mysticast, I *almost* completely agree with you. But the problem is that if a pilot or a doctor or a teacher shows up to work and someone suspects them of being drunk, you can very easily do a blood test, confirm that they're intoxicated, and send them home and fire them/revoke their license. It doesn't happen all the time, but there are a few crappy people out there, and the ability to enforce rules that prohibit working while intoxicated is important. There's currently no way to do a blood test and confirm that someone has enough marijuana in their system to be impaired. They might have smoked last week and would still have a positive blood test. We don't know what blood levels correspond with impairment. It would just be helpful to have the ability to do something about *if* some crazy pilot and his entire crew ever showed up to fly an airplane high. (http://www.gadling.com/2010/03/11/cops-arrest-entire-drunk-crew-from-ukraine-airline/) — Izzy812
- Actually, blood tests have a pretty small window during which a user will test positive. And unlike urine exams, blood tests actually pick up on the active levels of THC in a user's system. Although you're right that it's still very difficult to know exactly what levels correspond to impairment, by virtue of knowing the level of THC in the user's system it is much easier to know when the cannabis was ingested and eliminate any possibility of a 'second hand smoke' positive that is possible, though unlikely, with urinalysis. — PRphillyphan17
- Decades of time and billions of dollars have not been able to put a dent in the so called "War on Drugs" [really a war on the poorest Americans as well as being a racially motivated form of population control.] It's time to end the farce. Americans, including fine upstanding Pennsylvania citizens WANT it. It's a commodity - TAX it and let the public have what they want. Stop making criminals of our fellow citizens. Legalize marijuana NOW! Start filling the State's empty coffers with legitimate tax dollars. Put the cartels out of business. They won't be able to compete with a legal product.— bad joe s
