Trump’s marijuana misstep

Last week, Trump stated his support for Florida’s Amendment 3 through a post on the social media platform, saying that “it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use” and that he will work with Congress in “supporting states rights to pass marijuana laws, like in Florida, that work so well for their citizens.”

It is not just about states’ rights for him, of course. Trump is well-documented as a teetotaler — he knows the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and he is not willing to take the risk. Nevertheless, Trump’s strong convictions do not lead him to a principled rejection of legalized marijuana. Instead, a broadened voter base convinces him of the opposite.

By supporting the amendment, Trump will have one fewer issue that grants Vice President Kamala Harris a majority of voter support. It is a political move that plays into the vast, sometimes harmful, sense of freedom so precious to Americans. In the case of marijuana, “legalization is mostly about getting votes by enabling people’s base impulses,” the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman wrote for City Journal. It appeals to people’s latent interest in vice over the many detrimental effects marijuana has on society. 

Marijuana legalization looks increasingly like the major cause of a public health crisis as well as a threat to general safety, such as with amplified cartel activity. These should be compelling enough reasons to restrict the drug rather than let people plunge their cities into disaster.

Once Oregon decriminalized hard drugs, utter disaster is what took hold. The state saw surges in homelessness, crime, and overdose deaths, to name only a few problems, and it subsequently recriminalized the drugs after a three-year experiment.

Oregon may be an extreme example, but it confirms the basic facts that drugs wreak havoc and that people will go way too far in using them. Legalized marijuana is on a much smaller scale than decriminalized fentanyl, but its effects would gradually prove catastrophic. 

Trump’s prattle about “small amounts” of “safe, tested product” sounds a lot like the “safe, legal, and rare” jargon the Democratic Party abandoned long ago. It is not so hard to see that movements to legalize essentially bad things tend to start this way. Soon, it could be that marijuana expands beyond minimal use to near unlimited, and any disagreement is unacceptable.

It might not be that legal recreational marijuana leads to the same for hard drugs, but it is likely that these drugs are given a more favorable view as a result. Already, there have been Congress-supported studies on psychedelics as treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. 

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The greater push there is for the destigmatization of hard drugs, the less care with which they will be handled. Well-meaning, ill-conducted studies (such as these studies backing MDMA-based treatments rejected by the Food and Drug Administration) will become more common and more detrimental. 

Drugs make for a fast track to failure, and Trump knows it. Sure, his support for legal marijuana is just more politicking. That does not dilute the evidence of its negative effects.