The Drug Report
The Drug Report
Balancing Individual Rights and Public Health in Drug Policy w/Charles Lehman, Manhattan Institute
Can the profit motive in free markets lead to disastrous outcomes when it comes to addictive substances like marijuana? We explore this vital question with Charles Lehman from the Manhattan Institute, who brings a compelling analysis of the economic and societal impacts of marijuana legalization. Charles discusses the tension between individual rights and community well-being, emphasizing how addiction can significantly distort rational self-interest. We also shine a light on the often-overlooked societal costs, such as increased emergency services and workplace accidents, that accompany marijuana legalization.
In our conversation, we unravel the complexities of addiction and the predictable failures of rationality it involves, using the opioid crisis as a striking example. We delve into Mark Kleiman's innovative ideas on marijuana regulation and the challenges of prohibition versus legalization. Political motivations behind marijuana pardons and changing public sentiments towards legal cannabis are also dissected. Tune in for personal reflections on marijuana use and insights from those in recovery, shaping a broader understanding of drug policy and addiction.
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Yes or no? Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?
Speaker 2:I believe nicotine is not addictive. Yes, Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction.
Speaker 1:I don't believe that nicotine for our products are addictive.
Speaker 2:I believe nicotine is not addictive. I believe that nicotine is not addictive. I believe that nicotine is not addictive.
Speaker 1:Hello everyone, happy Monday. This is Luke Niferatos. I'm your host of the TDR podcast. I want to thank our two sponsoring organizations SAM, smart Purchases of Marijuana, as well as the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions or FDPS. And also, you know, for those of you who don't get our twice-weekly newsletter, please check out thedrugreportorg where you can sign up for our newsletter. You can see our website with all of our various articles and editorials we have and catch up on all the latest stuff on drug policy. Well, today I'm really excited to have Charles Lehman from the Manhattan Institute here joining me. Charles, thank you for joining me on the show.
Speaker 2:I'm glad to be on. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:That's great. Well, I wanted to have you on because, for those of you who are following the drug policy space, charles has been very actively writing a ton of just really high quality literature and written works on these issues, but really is on a tear. Just in the last couple of weeks, you had a really amazing long form piece on the outcomes of legalization in New York that was published in the New York Times, and then you followed that up. As if that wasn't enough writing, you followed it up with a great one in the dispatch on the outcomes of marijuana legalization more broadly as well. Both of these were really great pieces, and so I actually want to just jump right into it.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to read an excerpt that jumped out at me as I was reading your New York Times piece. So here we go. I've also come to think that debating whether individuals should use marijuana obscures the harms that come when we let businesses sell it, and while I, as a conservative, think that free markets do enormous good, I also think that combining addiction with the profit motive creates perverse incentives, letting corporations compete to help people ruin their lives. I just thought that was a really profound statement, especially for somebody who's a prominent conservative thinker. So what brought you to that conclusion?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and ultimately I think the answer is to stick with the. I'm a conservative theme and I'm sure not all of your listeners are, but I hope they'll hear me out from that perspective. It is thinking economistically that really got me to that position and thinking about not. When you talk about the dispute of marijuana being an individual dispute, we're talking about basically is it moral or is it not to use marijuana? And my response is look, some people use marijuana fine, healthily, or certainly not in a way that is actively destructive to them, and some people use it not so healthily.
Speaker 2:But that's really, I think, when you think on the individual level, you're missing a whole set of dynamics.
Speaker 2:You're missing the way in which the profit motive, which is a great tool for creating value, wealth and well-being in society, aligns the interests of the buyer and seller, insofar as both are rationally self-interested, and that addiction and addiction to marijuana or really to any other addictive substance, affects a buyer's rationality vis-a-vis his consumption, that the more he consumes of the thing that he's addicted to, the worse for him it is.
Speaker 2:But there is no particular check on the seller. It's in the rational self-interest of the seller to keep giving him the thing that is harmful to him. And to scale that up, you start to recognize features of markets in the district of goods that 10% to 20% of the consumers will do 80% to 90% of the consuming. That they will be focused on potency and price. That that will drive up the potency of the product and out-compete other concerns like quality or safety. These are not just like, these aren't market failures. This is the market working rationally, as we understand markets to work, and so my view is addictive substances generally, and marijuana as a species of addictive substance has these have these specific qualities as goods, and so we need to think about the markets in them in particular, ways that distinguish them from non-addictive substances or non-addictive goods.
Speaker 1:Very good. So you're saying if Adam Smith were alive today, it would be the invisible green hand?
Speaker 2:Well, right, you know it's exactly the attitude inside. It's not, I feel, not of the beneficence of the butcher, the baker, the rest of the life of the wealth of nations. But it's exactly that. It's about aligning interest, even when what is short-run in your interest is very harmful to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I think it's really interesting because, yeah, like you're getting at a few different key philosophical touchstones of this debate, particularly with marijuana legalization, where you know the individual and their rights versus the community and the impact on the community. And so what I'm hearing from you is you know, I think there's and this is something that you know is evident with all of drug policy where you know, like you said, typically it's a very small number of people who make up most of the consumption. So you know, when we're doing these, when we're having these debates about legalization, it's maybe not the full story, not the full argument to say, well, you know it affected X, y and Z people and it really didn't. You know it didn't impact them that negatively. But what about the sliver of the population where it really has a very negative impact, and not only is it a negative impact on them, it's a negative impact that can be quantified on the society you know more broadly, whether it's emergency services, road deaths, workplace accidents, things of that nature workplace accidents, things of that nature.
Speaker 2:Look, I mean, this is the trade-off in talking about drug prohibition generally or addictive substance control generally. Right Is that the best estimates are something like between 20% and 40% of first-time heroin users will end up addicted, which means if I tried heroin, I have a three in five, four in five chance of not getting addicted to heroin. Heroin is just a pretty fun. I'm not encouraging your listeners to try heroin, to be clear. But the point is, you know, there's some number of noodles lost by the fact that we don't let people buy heroin at the gas station. Right, we don't do that, and the reason for that is that for the 20 to 40% of the population who tries heroin, who does end up addicted, it's really life-alteringly bad and we see no intention, there's a trade-off and we say the trade-off is not worth making.
Speaker 2:What is? The harms that accrue to the addicted person are not worth the benefits that go to everyone else.
Speaker 1:Right, and I think you know it's funny, because I think a lot of people in this country think well, these drugs that are considered to be hard drugs are just, you know, like heroin, for example, you know, or crack, or whatever meth you are just going to be addicted to them right away. That's why you know we prohibit them and that's not why A lot of people use these drugs. They don't become immediately addicted. Some people don't even experience the tremendous, awful hardships. It's that at a population level, when you have normalized this use, then you're talking about tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans that end up using this at scale. And then what are the odds of all the various downstream consequences? And I think that's an important consideration to make.
Speaker 2:One of the dynamics you talk about in public policymaking is concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, which is how you end up getting regulatory capture. Somebody benefits from the regulation in a big way, some business or whatever, and they're sort of small diffuse costs to everybody else. With addiction, you see the opposite. You see concentrated costs, diffuse benefits, and so it is very easy to sort of wave away those costs, even though they are quite large in absolute terms, because they happen at the population level. This is why I like to say drugs are risky, right, their harms are not obtained in every circumstance. It's hard for people to reason out risk. We really struggle with it. This, by the way, is like part of why, when you talk to teenagers, you know you want to be informed, but like part of the challenge to talk to teenagers, they don't really get the risk concept. Part of the utility of like starting from the perspective of discouraging kids from using drugs, is that they aren't well equipped to reason about this is risky. This is not.
Speaker 1:Right, and actually that's a great point, so I'm springing this on you. I didn't prep you for this, so if you didn't read it, that's fine. Did you read the British Columbia health report from last week?
Speaker 2:I haven't read I haven't actually read the full report. I've seen the. I've seen the recommendations.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, so basically for those, our listeners and for your benefit, essentially, they came out and said we, the, the government of British Columbia, in Canada, their health department came out and issued a large report saying we should treat all drugs exactly like grocery store items and basically inform users so they can make informed purchase decisions, just like we expect them to do with grocery stores and food products and other such things.
Speaker 1:And that's what we should do. And they referred to the quote, unquote iron law of prohibition which, just for the record, is not an iron law, but that's referenced and cited in the report and it brings that to mind. As you're talking about this idea of having rational purchase decisions being made in this marketplace when addiction and other things are getting in the way is, you know, there's this, this just I called it Alice in Wonderland in our press release an Alice in Wonderland conception of how drug purchasing and drug use work. And it's this idea that we can educate people and then they're going to make informed consumption choices and we can mitigate the damages. What do you make of that? Yeah, what do you think?
Speaker 2:about that. It is not merely, you know, sort of unrealistic, it's out of line with decades of understanding of behavioral economics as a discipline. Right, we know that people are not merely not perfectly rational, but irrational in predictable ways. There are lots of. I try very hard not to wade into the fight over what is addiction, because it's a big, thorny fight and nobody can agree. But I think a useful. All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
Speaker 2:A useful model is that addiction is a particular failure mode in decision making where each instance, in the short run, it is irrational for you to continue to do something that is long run irrational. It's almost like being trapped in a bad equilibrium where it is always slightly rational to take the next dose, even though the compounding effects of taking a lot of doses are going to harm you. So it is not. You know. The failure there is that the problem is not one of knowledge, and you see this, by the way, with fentanyl use in the United States too.
Speaker 2:It used to be the case that people were not using fentanyl, thought they were buying heroin. They were getting fentanyl. They didn't realize they got hooked on fentanyl. It were getting fentanyl. They didn't realize they got hooked on fentanyl. It is now the case that people actively seek out fentanyl and the harm reduction. People will tell you this that fentanyl is a superior product and people prefer the superior product. People who use drugs are not stupid, but they are subject to the same challenges to rationality that the rest of us are and the limits of rationality that the rest of us are, and the predictable failures of rationality. And so if your mental model is just like people are, simply ill-informed you are. You are stuck in the 1960s.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, we have a better model of how humans think than we used to right. It's just, it's really wild. And I just was struck by look reading that report when they compared it to grocery store items and I thought, you know, we have an obesity crisis in most of the parts of the world and it's you know. We put nutrition facts and labels and warnings and education campaigns.
Speaker 1:And WHO is doing all this internationally? And yet people still make very poor purchase decisions based on a whole wide variety of factors. And so this idea that with these very deadly drugs, where you know if you misuse a very sugary product, you know your worst outcome is some health issues, maybe some weight gain, something of that nature. But if you misuse a drug you're supposed to be informed about using, the consequences could be death, could be addiction, could be so many more extreme, you know catastrophic outcomes. And so I think coming to terms with the fact that this just can't be treated like any other commodity out there is really, I think, important, and I think it gets at the center thesis of what a lot of your writing over the last few weeks has been getting at.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the other component there is the properties of that commodity are particularly attractive for again, are particularly attractive for business, while at the same time being harmful to consumers, being harmful to the people who business is selling to. So you talk about the iron law of prohibition. This is the Richard Cowan idea. It's a marijuana legalizer, nice guy. Actually. The Richard Cowan idea that prohibition causes concentration, and this is true during alcohol prohibition. I think it's unclear if this is Increasing potency.
Speaker 1:That's what this report said. Yeah, with prohibition that means they get more potent.
Speaker 2:It creates the fentanyls, it creates all these problems which is preposterous on its face for a couple of reasons, not least of which that we had almost 100 years of opioid prohibition before fentanyl suffused the market. That's right. There was no phase change.
Speaker 1:With marijuana. Marijuana got way more potent after they commercialized it. Then the potency was driven up.
Speaker 2:Our mutual friend, the drug policy researcher John Calkins, observes that persuasively to me that the annual prohibition probably explains a partial effect. It's probably the case that one effect of prohibition is that that happens, but that effect in the aggregate is probably swamped by other things, is probably swamped by other things, most notably in the case of marijuana, when you permit, when you end prohibition, legalize retail sale, or when you commercialize the innovation that is brought to bear on the quality of that product. People want to buy potent product. It's because it's more reinforcing. You will have much more innovation in the production of potent product under a legal regime where you can pay people with expertise to actually get involved, make a lot of money off of it. Then you will under a prohibited regime and so that ends up dominating. That affects the dominating.
Speaker 2:The point being, the profit motive is a powerful tool for seeking optimal outcomes. This is what you miss when you talk about it like the grocery store. The profit motive produces optimal outcomes. In the grocery store, like, we have better produce than any human being has ever had in human history. It's great. It's not great when it's a substance that can seriously harm or kill you.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. So Jonathan Calkins he mentioned we had a great interview on the podcast a few episodes ago For those of you listeners who want to hear what Jonathan Hawkins has to say. With his latest study on THC and the usage, daily use, we had a great, great interview on that. So thank you for bringing him up. So you mentioned in your pieces that you had at one point used marijuana in your life and you really kind of had a somewhat, I guess, libertarian, so to speak, view of it. So what would you say is kind of you know what was your kind of come to, you know, I guess, road to Damascus moment, if you will like, where you kind of you know thought, okay, well, you know what, maybe this isn't just an individual issue Like what really tipped the scale for you.
Speaker 2:I mean, the actual answer is that I'm a huge dork, um, because, uh, is that you try to put front and center the experience of people in recovery, people who have been harmed by marijuana, who've dealt with disorders. I am not that, um, I, you know, I've tried marijuana a handful of times in my life. It's not really. For me, it's fine, um, and I think that's true of a lot of people. Uh, I don't. But what actually changed my mind?
Speaker 2:The genuine answer is reading the works of Mark Kleiman, who is, for the listeners who don't know, an extraordinarily influential drug policy commentator who was an advocate later in his life of marijuana legalization. What I think persuaded me is that Kleiman basically he's a professor. He talks about if we would. He lays out many of the arguments I'm laying out. A lot of immigrants come from him and he says, look, there are ways to regulate the marijuana market, to obviate these concerns, we could design around this. And he's talking about, like we could have mail, we could have government run mail order systems right for who gets low potency marijuana. That is simply not what happened. It's not what was ever going to happen.
Speaker 1:And it's never happened.
Speaker 2:One of the realities, yeah, Inconceivable. Um yeah, so I found his arguments persuasive and then I sort of looked at what happened when his approach, when he tried to agitate, when he tried to say publicly here's how we should do this, what a failure that was. And I was like it kind of seems like prohibition was the better solution.
Speaker 1:Right, and it's interesting because and a really good point about the better solution versus the solution I noticed you were careful with the words there, and I think it's fair, because there is no easy, complete, total panacea solution to this. And I think that's where the debate really goes awry, because there are people that say look at the war on drugs it failed. Look at marijuana prohibition it failed. People use it all the time. So they say, therefore we should legalize it to solve this problem. But legalizing it comes with then a whole other set of problems. And so you know, I always point to you look at prevalence of use, and it's so much less than our legal or, excuse me, yeah, it's so much less prevalence of use of our illegal drugs. Marijuana included, from a federal perspective, is a fraction of a fraction of the prevalence of our legal drugs, obviously, and so I think that you look at that and that's where you start with the calculus, at least through my own heuristic.
Speaker 2:You look at that and that's where you start with the calculus, at least through my own heuristic. Yeah, I mean this is a classic Kleinman point. He always said drug control policy, you can never have a policy without problems. The question is always choosing your problems. Which problems do you want to have? Which is the optimal set of problems?
Speaker 2:You know, I think that in the case of marijuana there are ways to sort of mitigate some of the harms of prohibition. There's a broad spectrum I talk about it in the New York Times piece a broad spectrum of policy options. The reality is something like 13 states decriminalized marijuana in the 1970s. Basically it turned out fine. There was some evidence of a slight increase in usage. It basically washes out after five to 10 years. I am less persuaded that by the late 1990s or the 2000s we really were incarcerating a lot of people for marijuana. We kind of weren't. But look, I'm not inert to the harms of simply arresting lots of people for marijuana, even on a pretextual basis. We can go back and forth on this, but the reality is you can sort of settle that major concern the criminal justice, violence and prohibition without creating a legal recreational market Right.
Speaker 1:And that's what Sam's always advocated is this third way approach of dealing with possession, very low-level possession. Obviously we don't want to get into dealing and all those things, but low level possession, expungements and stuff. And so in your dispatch piece you wrote about Governor Westmore's pardons and kind of how he's trying to make that a really big deal. But to your point, they're just no, you know and they even had to acknowledge this in the following coverage that nobody got out of prison from this, that very few people were actually impacted. Now there were some and that was great. We supported that. But what was also interesting to us is that it was two years after they got the commercial market online that they then thought, ok, well, let's start doing the pardons, which we thought was really interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know Wes Moore is to read the political tea leaves. You know he wants to be seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party and 10, 15 years ago, being at the vanguard on marijuana was a great way to do that. And I think that that is you know. All of the low-hanging fruit has been plucked there and the public is going. Hang on a second. There are costs to this right. It's important to remember that. You know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. We are a population that is, you know, even since the beginnings of legalization under quote-unquote medicalization, essentially legalization for retail use with some restrictions. Even from the beginnings, many millions of Americans did not have any exposure to what living with legal weed was like. It was only recently the majority has experienced it, and so I think we are starting to sort of cool towards it, and you know efforts like Moore's are a way to say no. Really, it's still a great blow for justice to legalize weed, we promise. And it's like I don't think you can catch the fire a second time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree especially with all the issues of you know all the problems, health problems, psychosis and other issues which, speaking of that last question, I forget which one of the two pieces it was, but in that piece you said marijuana can increase your chances of schizophrenia, but so can owning cats. I thought, okay, I haven't heard that one before, so I wanted to give you a chance to expound a little more on that one.
Speaker 1:Right, the first one, and this is, I think, disputed in the literature, but the balance says it's true um cats carry a parasite called toxoplasmosis gondii, which exposure to, I think, sounds like shrooms to me, some sort of mushroom drink that's coming down the line um significantly raises your risk for schizophrenia down the line.
Speaker 2:Um, like like there is some scientific basis to the quote unquote crazy cat lady stereotype that cats can.
Speaker 2:Again, this is a little bit disputed, but the balance of the evidence says it's more plausible than not, and my point there, by the way, is like this is part of why marijuana's addictiveness matters. We do let people do things which are harmful to them. We let people skydive, we let them drive really fast cars, and to me the relevant question is owning a cat is something that does not inhibit my ability to reason about costs and benefits and about the short run versus long run. Being addicted to marijuana does inhibit my ability to reason, so I am ultimately somebody who's wary of government regulation and, as a consequence, I think it matters that we carve out and say this particular quality is dangerous enough in a specific way. It causes a market failure in a specific way. That is right for government to step in. In a way that I don't ultimately support government cat control, even though there is a risk that we have at least plausible evidence to believe is associated with increased risk for schizophrenia.
Speaker 1:Trevor Burrus Jr. Okay, very interesting. I hadn't heard that one before, but thought that was interesting. I'm almost certain your chances of getting schizophrenia from using marijuana are much higher than cat ownership, peter.
Speaker 2:T. It would be a surprise, Trevor Burrus Jr. This is a good warning.
Speaker 1:This is a good warning. Peter T yeah, trevor Burrus Jr, I only own a cat for about six months of my life, so I think my chances are hopefully pretty diminished.
Speaker 2:I believe it's really about handling the litter. Ah, okay, it's where the parasite resides.
Speaker 1:Interesting, interesting, okay, very good. Well, that was a great response. I was not expecting that one. That was very good, charles. Well, thank you for joining us on the TDR podcast. It was a great discussion. You're writing fantastic pieces out there, so where can folks connect with you, follow your works that you have out there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I'm on the artist, formerly known as Twitter. I'm at Charles F Lehman, l-e-h-m-a-n and you can also find me. I work for the Manhattan Institute. We're Think Tank. I'm there and I'm at our flagship publication, city Journal. That's city-journalorg, and I have a sub stack which is called the Causal Fallacy, which is like-.
Speaker 1:I love that one.
Speaker 2:It's about James Q Wilson. You can read the whole explanation. I'm just a huge dork. Is like the explanation of most things that I do.
Speaker 1:It's very good. Well, you're a very smart dork and you got good views on this issue, so keep up the great work and thanks again for joining us. Thanks, have a good one.