William J. Bennett - Going to Pot: Why the Rush to Legalize Marijuana Is Harming America

W e are at a curious, as well as critical, moment in our country. Just when we are spending more than ever on early childhood education (and many are arguing for even more spending), just when we are debating the intellectual and motivational needs of our present and future work force, just as we are concerned about unemployment numbers that are too high (especially in the youth and young adult population), just as we are unveiling a new experiment on universal health care coverage, and just as we are condemning other products deemed unhealthy, like sugars and trans fats, we areat the same exact timemoving in fact and opinion toward more and more marijuana legalization. We are spending money and political capital on strengthening the health, education, and productivity of our populace, yet society believes it appropriate to push for greater availability of a drug that hinders, and negatively affects (perhaps dramatically), those very efforts.

Over the past several years, as public opinion has moved toward greater acceptance of marijuana, an increasing body of scientific evidence has documented the multiple adverse effects of marijuana use. These serious health issues are detailed in an excellent article produced by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and published in the June 2014 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. We believe this article should be read by everyone, particularly proponents of legalization, and so we have included it in our appendix. The negative consequences of marijuana legalization, particularly those experienced by adolescents, are too crucial to ignore. As you can see from Table 1 of that article, a variety of short- and long-term effects should give pause to anyone who might believe that smoking marijuana is harmless.

On an almost weekly basis, medical researchers, aided by advanced technology not available decades ago, are expanding our knowledge of the negative health consequences of smoking marijuana. As we will discuss in more detail in later chapters, more than smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana can damage the heart, lungs, and brain. Moreover, it immediately impairs cognitive abilities and motor coordination, interfering with the smokers judgment, driving skills, and other basic abilities. Normal development of the adolescent brain is at particularly high risk. Smoking marijuana deposits more tar into the lungs than smoking a cigarette, and there are numerous cancer-causing chemicals in marijuana. There is nearly a fivefold increase in the risk of heart attack in the first hour after smoking marijuana. It is a bitter irony that as our knowledge increases regarding the harm that smoking marijuana does to our health, public perception of those injuries decreases. It is our purpose in this book to inform an uninformed, and sometimes misinformed, public about the true risks of legalization.