I took an interest in this article, What-makes-marijuana-users-different-from-everyone-else, Washington Post. I intended to pick at some of the conclusions they reached or didn’t reach. However, as I began to write, I realized this is a story about the failure of journalism to inform and outright mislead the credulous reader.
The article reports on:
A massive study published this month in the Journal of Drug Issues found that the proportion of marijuana users who smoke daily has rapidly grown, and that many of those frequent users are poor and lack a high-school diploma.
Examining a decade of federal surveys of drug use conducted between 2002 and 2013, study authors Steven Davenport and Jonathan Caulkins paint one of the clearest pictures yet of the demographics of current marijuana use in the U.S.
Some of the high points:
- in the 1990’s 1 in 9 people who smoked marijuana did so on a daily basis. Now the ratio is 1 in 3. (With the advent of legal marijuana in some states the potency of today’s marijuana is far greater than most 1990’s marijuana).
- 13% of the adult population does not have a high school diploma, among daily marijuana smokers that number climbs to 19%.
- 19% of the adult population has a household income of $20,000, that number climbs to 27% for the daily marijuana user. 1/4 of a daily users income will go towards marijuana use.
In effect 17 is the high point of a daily marijuana users life. It’s all downhill from here. The writer quoted a “massive study” and this is the best he can do?Is this a cautionary tale? What purpose does this story serve?
I suspect that the writer based his article on the abstract offered as an introduction to the study. The abstract is free, the study itself may incur a cost. It is interesting that the only fact that didn’t make the transition from abstract to article was the fact that the purchase price has not changed but the quantity has decreased, suggesting that a higher potency marijuana is being offered for sale.
You will almost never see this point discussed in a MSM article about marijuana. The Mexican weed that the anybody over 35 smoked in college had a THC potency of .03%. The THC potency of marijuana offered for sale in Colorado or at any medical marijuana dispensary is going to range from 9% to 28%. You can still get Mexican weed and you can still pay $20-25 for a four finger lid (Texas price). But if you want what is being offered in Colorado that four finger lid is going to cost $350-450 a lid. So old folks everything you thought you knew, you don’t.
It remains for me to provide the cautionary tale. As an old drug warrior, I know it is fashionable to dismiss anything I say about dope as a reflection of my bias and give me zero credibility. I have dealt with ignorant bastards all my professional life, don’t see why things should change now. So I am not going to offer my opinion. I’m going to point you in the right direction and you can do your own research.
The British have been sounding the alarm since the mid 1990’s. I suspect they started seeing the effects of high potency marijuana before the USA did because of the Amsterdam coffee shops, that didn’t sell coffee. If you can’t find a dozen research papers dealing with marijuana and psychosis, marijuana and schizophrenia, or comparing the effects of high potency versus low potency marijuana, and casual use versus daily use in “The Lancet”, you are not looking.
It is an English medical journal that publishes scholarly articles. I have included one such article, Lancet. This article discusses the relationship between daily use of high potency marijuana and the vulnerability to psychotic episodes. The English research is well advanced and doesn’t paint a rosy picture for habitual daily marijuana users, but that goes against the narrative.