Primer: Cannabis
Over the last decade, states across the country have embraced the legalized sale and use of recreational cannabis, with the aims of ending unjust criminalization, delivering safer products, reducing arrests, raising new tax revenue, and undercutting the illicit market. In Illinois, which legalized cannabis use for residents aged 21 or older in 2020, a statewide licensed market has taken shape and state-reported sales and tax receipts have grown year after year. This debate therefore undertakes a retrospective assessment: to what extent has cannabis legalization in Illinois and comparable U.S. jurisdictions been a success or failure?
Cannabis is a psychoactive drug that consists of the leaves and flowers of the cannabis sativa plant. With both medicinal and recreational uses, cannabis produces effects including euphoria, relaxation, altered perception, and impaired coordination and memory. In the United States, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, cannabis was aggressively criminalized by federal and state governments, driven by political campaigns and moral panics that associated its use with marginalized communities, leading to arrests and incarceration that disproportionately impacted Black Americans despite similar rates of use across groups.
In the years since, lawmakers and advocates have advanced decriminalization and legalization as more sensible policies. Today, as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, cannabis use of any kind remains criminalized under federal law. However, cannabis is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia for recreational use and in 40 states for medicinal use.
Opponents of legalization argue that the policy has failed to promote the welfare of the American people by dramatically expanding access to a substance with well-documented risks and few benefits. On this view, cannabis today is more dangerous, more available, and more normalized than ever before — not only because of the erosion of legal prohibition per se but also because of the consequent developments of cultural de-stigmatization and of the emerging commercial ecosystem designed to cultivate addiction for the sake of profit. Dispensaries have proliferated rapidly, cannabis product forms have multiplied, all while the industry’s incentives favor heavy and frequent use at the expense of consumers’ health. The result, critics contend, is an aggressive private market that targets populations most vulnerable to dependence and addiction to the detriment of society as a whole.
On the other hand, supporters of cannabis legalization argue that it is a necessary correction to decades of failed prohibition. In this view, the remedy for the excesses resulting from legalization and commercialization is not a return to criminalization but stricter regulation, including clear limits on potency, tighter controls on marketing, and a stronger public health commitment by the government. The solution, then, is not at all a return to prohibition but merely a tightening of regulations.
An instructive analogue is alcohol. Both are intoxicants whose risks depend on frequency, dose, and context, as well as the rules that govern production, pricing, access, and advertising. The alcohol experience suggests that harms are shaped less by legality itself — recall the edifying experiment of 18th Amendment — than by the surrounding regulatory regime, including taxes calibrated to potency, age restrictions, warning labels, and impaired-driving enforcement.
Beneath the surface lies a deeper dispute about the role of government in a liberal society. For some, the law must acknowledge adult autonomy and the right for people to decide what is best for themselves. However, for others, the social costs of marijuana as a drug, particularly for youth, people with substance-use vulnerabilities, undermines public health goals and is thus not a trade-off worth making.
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