The festive opening of a cannabis dispensary in the French Quarter this week is a dreadful sign of societal decay, of refusal to acknowledge scientific fact – and of bad state lawmaking.
Peer-reviewed study after peer-reviewed study for a quarter century now has shown that marijuana is a far more dangerous drug than decades of street lore said it was. Yes, there is copious evidence indicating that substances in marijuana can help fight extreme nausea and pain associated, for example, with cancer and its treatments. Yet even sounder science suggests that “medical” marijuana use should be a rare exception to what ordinarily should be illegal status.
And the celebratory scene described in this newspaper’s coverage of the Bourbon Street dispensary opening, with on-site telehealth “diagnoses” and virtually immediate distribution of cannabis, is an outrage. State lawmakers screwed up royally by creating such an open, legalized market for a seriously dangerous substance, now available within ten minutes of walking in a shop door.
What the article described as “three stories of edibles, vapes, cannabis flower as well as features like a third-floor gallery, theater experience and terpene smell bar,” with its “curated strains, including Wednesday’s selection of Kool Whip, OG Pop Tartz and Peach Gelato Kush,” isn’t rigorously medical; it’s a masquerade and mockery of truly curative treatments.
The New York Times reported last month more of the same sort of evidence that has been building for decades: Prevalence in the U.S. of a malady known as cannabis use disorder is growing significantly in recent years, and about 30% of cannabis users develop signs of the problem. It’s also more addictive than alcohol use, which leads to “use disorder” among fewer than 20% of drinkers.
A 2023 report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that almost half of marijuana addicts suffer other mental-health illnesses such as anxiety, major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, hallucinatory delirium, schizophrenia or suicidality. And another study released jointly in 2023 by researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and at Denmark’s National Institute on Drug Abuse and Mental Health showed that among men aged 21-30, “as many as 30% of cases of schizophrenia among men aged 21-30 might have been prevented by averting cannabis use disorder.” It’s not just that plenty of those who already are schizophrenics smoke weed; the study says the pot use often triggers the schizophrenia, which otherwise likely would not develop.
