Governors brag about policy accomplishments all the time. If a state’s crime rate has fallen, or a state’s businesses create jobs, or a state finishes a key infrastructure project, governors will tell you about it. They have every right to. Governors should keep the public informed about all the positive things they have brought to their state.
But what about policy milestones that aren’t so positive? Should governors brag about rising homelessness? Or traffic deaths? Or falling test scores? They will if they think they can get away with it.
Which is why Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) is proudly owning the rise of marijuana sales in his state. “For the third year in a row, Illinois had record-setting growth for adult-use cannabis sales,” Pritzker posted on X last week. “We’re building the most prosperous and accessible cannabis industry in the nation — taking steps to repair the damage of the past and creating real opportunity for all Illinoisans.”
In other words, “My administration is helping record numbers of residents get high on drugs. Isn’t that wonderful!”
No, it isn’t.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services is trying to move cannabis from its strict Schedule I designation to the less strict Schedule III designation. “The risks to the public health posed by marijuana are lower compared to other drugs of abuse,” the HHS says. It may be true that marijuana use is not as immediately likely to cause death as alcohol or other legal drugs, but there is a growing body of evidence that long-term use of marijuana is harmful, especially to the young and especially to the babies of mothers who abuse it. Worse, the marijuana Pritzker is pushing on his residents today is far more harmful than the kind that drug dealers sold on the street a generation ago.
“This isn’t the cannabis of 20, 30 years ago,” Illinois addiction psychiatrist Dr. Deepali Gershan recently explained. Gershan said 20% of her caseload is patients for whom marijuana triggered a psychotic episode. And new research shows marijuana users are far more likely to develop schizophrenia after a drug-induced psychosis than any other drug, including amphetamines, hallucinogens, and alcohol.
The number of young people who report using marijuana regularly, thanks to politicians such as Pritzker telling them it is safe, is astounding. While just 0.8% of those ages 18-22 report using alcohol daily, 11.3% of marijuana users are smoking every day. Those daily uses are hitting young adult brains harder than before. Drug Enforcement Administration data show that the average potency of today’s marijuana is four times higher than in 1995.
Marijuana use is widespread and harmful to mothers and children. One 2019 study found that 22.4% of tested umbilical cords contain traces of THC. Cannabis use during pregnancy is associated with developmental delays, learning disabilities, lower IQs, and emotional disorders. Increased marijuana use is obviously a bad thing.
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Illinois has very little to celebrate these days, with crime up and the state bleeding population to Republican-controlled jurisdictions. The pension system is the nation’s worst-funded.
Perhaps the state’s many problems, all of them caused by poor government, explain the governor’s satisfaction that his fellow citizens are increasingly hooked on pot.