Elias: California’s pot industry doesn’t deserve special status or favors

The ill effects of cannabis use have been well known for generations: spaced out behavior, impaired judgment, clouded or heightened senses depending on your personal biology, a distorted sense of time, slowed reactions, lower motor skills, reduced inhibitions, less mental focus and memory.

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That’s only part of the list, which some claim is balanced by the relaxing effects of marijuana and its partially proven ability to ease the pain caused by some medical treatments. Despite all the harms of marijuana, California legislators have steadily pushed increases in its use ever since recreational pot sales became legal via a 2016 state ballot initiative.

Now California’s Assembly has passed yet another measure to ease life for pot shops. If passed by the state Senate, this one, known as AB 564 and sponsored by Assemblymember Matt Haney, D-San Francisco, would lower the state excise tax on legal pot from the 19% it automatically reached on July 1 back to 15% until at least 2030, squashing a potential future increase to 25%.

This measure is designed to protect legal pot prices from being undercut by untaxed illegal growers whose product is widely available on the black market. It comes just a year after legislators also tried to help legal pot use by allowing Amsterdam-style lounges that could serve food and drinks along with varieties of marijuana.

The real question here is what legalized pot has done to deserve the most-favored-business status informally bestowed upon it by lawmakers. No one has produced any information to refute the long list of harmful pot effects, and two new studies originating in Northern California raise new questions about continued recreational sales of cannabis.

One, co-authored by researchers from the Kaiser Permanente health care service and Oakland’s regional Public Health Institute, found that teenagers living in areas with more cannabis stores experience significantly higher rates of mental health issues.

The study used data from nearly 96,000 insured adolescents, finding that those in cities or counties without pot stores are significantly less likely to have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Researchers found that greater retail activity and availability — regardless of laws prohibiting sales to those younger than 18 — translated to higher rates of diagnosed psychotic, depressive and anxiety disorders.

“This study reinforces the importance of where and how cannabis is sold in protecting adolescent mental health,” said Lynn Silver, M.D., a program director at the Public Health Institute.

Almost simultaneously, a UC San Francisco study determined that long-term cannabis use is linked to a greater likelihood of developing heart disease. The risk stems from reduced blood vessel function, according to the study published in the American Medical Association’s journal Cardiology.

The study involved 55 “outwardly healthy persons between 18 and 50.” It revealed that eating edible marijuana products like gummies has the same impact on heart health as smoking pot. Study subjects had been consuming marijuana in one form or another at least three times weekly for a year or more.

All of these regular users were discovered to have “decreased vascular function,” comparable to regular smokers. Their blood vessel capacity was found to be roughly half as high as among noncannabis users. We already knew marijuana use was harmful for bunches of reasons, but direct proof of significant long-term physical harm has been hard to find.

The findings reinforce a year-old study from the American Psychiatric Association warning that individuals who want to remain mentally sharp in old age (defined as 65 and older) should not smoke pot regularly or eat pot-laced products, which range from chocolates to layer cakes.

The question here is not whether marijuana use is harmful. That’s been known for at least a century, even if some details are only now emerging. The real question is why California legislators are so supportive of this harmful industry, treating it with kid gloves even as other drugs get harsh treatment.

Yes, campaign contributions by pot-linked labor unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers no doubt play a role in bringing near-unanimous votes on laws this industry wants passed. So do tax receipts. But legislators should be able to resist those pressures. This leads to another question: What drug are legislators using when they give sustained favored status to an industry that does much more harm than good?

Email Thomas Elias at [email protected], and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.