DEBATENATE

Topics / Health

The challenge

“Marijuana should be legal everywhere”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Marijuana is not the harmless plant on the T-shirt, and legal everywhere means more of it everywhere. In twenty seventeen the National Academies reviewed the research and found substantial evidence tying cannabis use to schizophrenia and other psychoses, with the heaviest users at the highest risk. In twenty nineteen the Surgeon General warned about what it does to a developing teenage brain. And this isn't your dad's weed. Lab tests of seized samples found THC content roughly tripled between nineteen ninety-five and twenty fourteen. You'll say alcohol is legal and it's worse. One legal mess is not an argument for a second one. Let me ask you this. If legal weed is so good for a town, why does every legalization law keep it away from kids? Guys, put it down. Nobody ever got high and got ahead.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The mental health risk is documented, and it climbs with heavy use.

    The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and the development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users.

  2. Teenagers pay the highest price, and a legal commercial market makes the product normal and everywhere.

    In 2019 the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory warning that marijuana use during adolescence and pregnancy can harm the developing brain.

  3. Today's product is far stronger than the one the legalization pitch remembers.

    ElSohly and colleagues, testing cannabis samples seized by the DEA, found average THC content rose from about 4 percent in 1995 to about 12 percent in 2014.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Prohibition has failed. People use it anyway, and criminal records for small possession have wrecked lives, especially for poor young men.

Nate: Then fix the penalty for a kid caught with a joint. That's a sentencing question. It's a long way from there to a national industry with billboards, gummies and a business model built on its heaviest users. You can show mercy to a user without handing the drug a marketing department.

The lines

Sources

  1. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research (2017)
  2. U.S. Surgeon General, Surgeon General's Advisory: Marijuana Use and the Developing Brain (2019)
  3. ElSohly, M.A. et al., Biological Psychiatry, Changes in Cannabis Potency Over the Last 2 Decades (1995-2014): Analysis of Current Data in the United States (2016)

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