In May 2024, the U.S. Senate again introduced legislation to federally legalize cannabis.
This proposed legislation comes on the heels of a Pew Research Center poll conducted in January 2024. The poll found that 88% of American adults think marijuana should be legal for medical or recreational use. As of this writing, cannabis is legal in 38 states for medical use and 24 for recreational use, and it’s decriminalized in seven more states. And while governors and legislators have reasons to push for federal legalization—public opinion might sway them, as might tax revenues that would come from the cannabis industry—Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman is warning officials to reconsider.
Jeffrey is a Columbia University professor and the president of ARETÉ Mental Well-Being and Human Potential. For more than 40 years, he’s provided clinical care for those with severe mental illness and has written more than 800 articles and 17 books on mental illness, psychopharmacology, and psychiatry. In a Time article, Jeffrey writes that as a practicing psychiatrist, he’s personally seen people admitted to hospital emergency rooms as a result of using cannabis, including (and especially) teenagers.
The problem with cannabis, he claims, is that the effects of marijuana on adult brains is documented. But there’s far less information out there about how marijuana affects the teenage brain. Jeffrey had previously written an article about this with Robert Dupont, founding director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which was published in Science.
In his Time article, Jeffrey also mentions that no one anticipated commercial cannabis to have concentrations of up to nearly 100% THC. (To compare, THC concentration of cannabis on the black market used to be around 10% or less.)
…which, of course, is seriously problematic, considering that many studies show high-potency cannabis is a serious detriment to mental health.
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