Editorial: “Experimenting with drugs in the US“
TWO states in the US are now more cannabis-friendly than many parts of Europe. Thanks to ballot initiatives passed by Colorado and Washington last week, people there now have legal access to as much recreational marijuana as they can grow, sell or smoke.
This is still illegal under US federal law, but if the states are left alone, the legalisation could launch a living experiment into how people behave when drug laws are relaxed, and into the public-health implications and the effect on the drug cartels.
Advertisement
“The Feds now have to decide whether to make that experiment impossible,” says , a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The Obama administration has yet to give its response to the votes, but a statement from the US Drug Enforcement Agency, which treats marijuana as an illegal drug, said: “The department’s enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged.”
, says that federal agencies have the authority to arrest anyone possessing marijuana, but they cannot stop the states from passing the laws, or make the states enforce federal law.
Still, the federal government could make life very difficult for the new industry, Mikos says, by seizing growers’ assets or prohibiting banks from opening accounts for people committing federal crimes. But even if the US government does crack down, Mikos says, it is not going to make much of a difference. “It will put a dent in the industry, but it will also affect the shape of it.” Small businesses will learn how to fly under the radar, he says, and state regulators will have to craft their new laws around federal law.
The biggest impact of full legalisation might be to permit research into cannabis that is currently impossible. No country has ever completely legalised marijuana. Portugal has decriminalised it and other drugs, but not legalised them. And in the Netherlands, where pot can be readily obtained in “coffee shops”, possession of small amounts of cannabis is decriminalised, and producing and selling the drug remains illegal. To understand the effect of cannabis on health, researchers need to measure individuals’ exposures to the drug over time and relate that to their health problems, says of the University of Bristol, UK. Doing such long-term studies in large groups of people is very difficult when use is illegal. “We can’t even get good self-reported use levels,” he says.
Even in the Netherlands, properly documented large-scale health studies have not been done because it is hard to convince people to reveal the kind of information needed. Under full legalisation, this should be possible. “It will be a natural experiment”, both into the impact of the policy on drug use and of drug use on users, says of Norwegian Social Research in Oslo.
“It will become a natural experiment into the impact of legalisation on drug use and of drug use on users”
Legalisation should also give researchers insight into how cannabis affects psychological problems, including settling the debate on whether it causes psychosis. Another big question is its impact on alcohol and tobacco use. People who use marijuana are more likely to drink alcohol than non-users, but researchers are not sure whether the two forms of intoxication reinforce one another or substitute for one another. If it is the latter, then legalising marijuana might be the best thing a state can do: alcohol generates a lot more social harm, says Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
David Nutt of Imperial College London, former head of the UK government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, points out that “ after they legalised medical marijuana”.
That is one of the few effects of medical marijuana that has been measured. Cannabis for medicinal use is legal in 18 US states, and the legal dispensaries have data on its effects – but no one is using the data. “People at the National Institutes of 91ɫƬ would like to assess the therapeutic benefits, but under US law they aren’t allowed to,” says Nutt. Research by the US , says a spokesperson, only “focuses on the negative aspects of drugs”.
The legal limbo between federal and state governments won’t be sustainable for much longer, many people feel. “Obama’s got a tough decision on his hands,” says Caulkins. Several medical dispensaries in California that allegedly sold to anyone , but “for every one they close down, another pops up”, says Mikos.
Obama also faces international pressure to make a decision. Mexico’s incoming president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has said his top priority is to decrease drug violence rather than to clamp down on drugs. If people in the US start buying American-grown marijuana, it could deal a significant blow to Mexico’s violent drug cartels. Research from the RAND Drug Policy Research Center in Santa Monica, California, estimates that : about $6 billion to $8 billion. Another study estimated that legalisation in Washington alone would subtract $1.4 billion from the cartels’ profits, but it is unclear whether this would reduce the violence. In response to the states’ laws, Luis Videgaray Caso, head of Peña Nieto’s transition team, said he was not sure whether Mexico could continue to .
“This is a watershed moment,” says Caulkins. “If this goes well over the next few years, the weight of public opinion could change quickly.” Mikos agrees, and says that if those states generate a lot of money from tax revenues, their neighbours may adopt similar measures. If so, “these laws could fundamentally change America’s relationship with marijuana”.
“This is a watershed moment. If it goes well, the weight of public opinion could change quickly”
A pharmaceutical treasure trove
The legalisation of cannabis in the US states of Washington and Colorado might improve our patchy understanding of the health effects of cannabis, but what about lab experiments on the drug itself?
We already know that a compound called cannabidiol (CBD) shows particular promise. It seems to kill cancer cells (, ), and is being tested in .
Marijuana can also contain varying amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the mood-altering ingredient, and more than 100 other cannabinoids. Many of these have not yet been tested for their pharmacological effects. “It’s a treasure trove,” says of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, who was part of a team that published a draft genome sequence of Cannabis sativa last year (Genome Biology, ). Further research, both on cannabinoid pharmacology and on the genomics of cannabis, “could help unlock the medical potential of this controversial plant”, he says.
What’s more, anecdotal evidence from the medical marijuana industry suggests that plants with different amounts of these components are useful for different conditions. High levels of , for instance. Research on cannabis with different ratios of these chemicals could put this on a stronger scientific footing, says Page.
It might be possible to study cannabinoids, for instance, to learn how they exert their effects, he says, but getting funding to show the medical benefit of the different types in people is likely to be very difficult, wherever you are based. “The controlled-substances laws make it difficult to get approval to work on the plant,” Page says. Sara Reardon
