Posted on by Nathan Riley

Give The Doctors A Chance

“To me it makes sense to give fairly wide latitude to the doctors and their patients, as they would know best what helps them and how to integrate cannabis into their care.”

This is the expert opinion of a specialist in addiction treatment who overcame his addiction to heroin and has his own website offering advice for dealing with the good and the bad in marijuana legalization and the use of “harder” drugs. Dr. Peter Grinspoon’s book Seeing through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth about Marijuana (p. 100) covers the waterfront. It offers an in-depth examination of drug use.

Most of the book is accessible to any reader, but in parts it is intricate. These sections are addressed to physicians in the hopes of creating a dialogue between doctors who look favorably on legalization and other physicians who think this is a dangerous road to travel.

One of his major purposes is to dispel the shame that often sits heavily on the drug user. Another objective is to make physicians aware that patients who use drugs are competent persons who are all too often misdiagnosed and considered driven by uncontrollable compulsions.

As the advice offered at the start of this article, he lays great stress on the doctor-patient relationship, a key proposal of Freedom Democrats. The book lends professional support and wise knowledge to this political objective of making the doctor-patient relationship a private matter.

In his opinion, addiction is a clinical judgment made after a consultation between a doctor and a patient. It involves an understanding of the patient’s goals and the doctor’s care. He eagerly tries to educate physicians on the use of marijuana as medicine. He is equally opposed to physicians who believe that drug users can’t be trusted and pain medication must be used sparingly. A patient suffering pain with a drug history is often refused pain medication or given such low doses as to provide no real relief for the patient.

The book is filled with suggestions for patients and doctors about finding a common perspective that permits the doctor to work without fear that they are enabling addiction. It is way too easy for a doctor to believe that drug use is laced with such harms, and that the worried physician ignores other gains that are tied to drug use.

In other words, a patient’s marijuana use or other drug use may bring real benefits. Dr. Grinspoon insists that physicians weigh the good and the bad. He reminds us that the bad is often dubious. Medical research has focused on negative outcomes without looking at the real-world gains experienced by users. Such gains should be an objective of the doctor patient relationship.

His book is a polemic against biased research that makes illegal drugs look dangerous, even if the same drug in a hospital or medical setting is used daily. He finds study after study that weights evidence to reach the conclusion that drug use is harmful.

One of Dr. Grinspoon’s hopes is that a common language and approach to evidence can bring a productive dialogue. Unhappily the history of drug research often reveals shoddy methods that bias results. Anyone who has followed the history of drug legalization will not be surprised, but the facts and names of these biased studies are easily found in this thoughtful overview.

While Dr. Grinspoon is often angered by “scientific research” that claims drugs are dangerous, he patiently outlines steps that can make studies fair. One favorite point he hammers home is the popular belief that marijuana interferes with short-term memory. Even studies that make marijuana seem dangerous must admit that this is a temporary condition. While high, a user may have memory difficulties; these disappear as the effect of marijuana dissipates. This conclusion is well established, but all too often the news stories issue unfounded warnings about pot and memory.

Dr. Grinspoon insists that objective research would look at the gains that a person might experience, making the memory lapse insignificant. A user might find his appreciation of a book increases and discover conclusions that would never be found if the person had not used grass.

One of Dr. Grinspoon’s objectives is to make the real-world experiences of drug use be an integral part of scientific research. He is not alone; there are unbiased studies discussing the positive impacts of drug use. He wants the scientific and medical community to find a common set of standards that will permit unbiased research to become the norm.

To be sure, there are dangers surrounding drug use. Dr. Grinspoon softly but firmly wants the banning of sweet edibles that could attract a child, who munches the drugs thinking it is candy but in fact produces massive overdoses. The positive effects of drugs can lead to mistaken beliefs. For example, that a drug will cure cancer.

This is a wise book that takes the guess work out of the growing legalization of drugs by state legislatures. Dr. Grinspoon insists that physicians can and should play an active role in this new legal environment. Physicians can offer real assistance to patients, and he wants the help to increase.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Don’t Stigmatize Drug Users

Creating a new politics of freedom doesn’t require constant hostility and opposition. In the case of marijuana, an object is to end stigmatization.

This movement is making telling progress: state after state and local governments are making marijuana legal. As is true of life: do something big and there must be problems.

But telling people that legal pot is especially strong and may not be fun is very different from saying pot is dangerous and shouldn’t be used. In fact, some doctors have a specialized knowledge and prescribe pot to alleviate unpleasant symptoms. Pot, for many people, relieves insomnia or negative feelings like anxiety.

Publications like Marijuana Moment that track news about pot regularly publicize studies that are balanced and even recommend pot. Ashley Bradford from Georgia Institute of Technology recently completed a study showing that “in states where both medical and recreational marijuana are legal, fewer patients are filling prescriptions for medications used to treat anxiety,” like antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, and antidepressants. They found “consistent evidence that increased marijuana access is associated with reductions in benzodiazepine prescription fills.”

In other words, powerful medications that have a potential for addiction are no longer used. Symptoms are treated by pot. Such research is spreading, and it is now commonplace to concede that marijuana has medical uses. Traditional researchers are still trying to tie marijuana use to bad outcomes, but research like that done by Ashley Bradford are finding positive outcomes.

It should come as no surprise that there are good and bad results. That is the way the real world works.

But getting researchers to look at the good as well as the bad is a continuing struggle.

Of course, users still enjoy getting high and find, for example, that pot enhances sex. Although I must admit I have seen no studies on pot and erectile dysfunction. I am quite confident that users can make up their own minds about these pleasures.

At 82, after 65 years of marijuana use, I got stoned over Christmas. It was a disaster. My sense of balance was challenged, and it took over a week for the ill effects to dissipate. Without any physical withdrawal, I concluded no more pot; I had reached a point where it harmed me rather than pleased me.

This is a world of difference from the harsh, even hostile, atmosphere that surrounded pot when I was young. Being mean was not even recognized. Frequently we were told that only dopes do dope. Telling a person that they are stupid undermines confidence and agency. It certainly doesn’t help a person gain control of their lives.

We are in a new era, where it is recognized that some people use it, others don’t, just as at the start of the century it finally became clear that some people are LGBTQ+ and others aren’t. What is important is doing no harm to users and treating marijuana users as sinners is harmful.

In fact, so preposterous were the arguments against marijuana that it became widely assumed that pot was natural and therefore even good for you. It is certainly true that some weed smokers saw their lives improve, but it is equally true that pot can provoke anxiety, vomiting. In other words, don’t turn a pleasure into a general rule for everyone.

The most dangerous drug is obviously alcohol, and we don’t tell everybody, “Drink.”

The big task facing us is helping people who use hard drugs like heroin and meth believe they can face problems however painful without using these drugs. It is equally important to recognize that somebody who gets high on a weekend night isn’t necessarily harmed. They should probably have access to pharmaceutically manufactured drugs where their potency and effects are carefully calculated. Once again, we face the rule that some people take drugs even when it causes them problems while others simply find it a moment of pleasure. In other words, society should give people the freedom to discover.

Freedom is about letting doctors and the public find a healthy path. One rule doesn’t fit everybody. In short, we must spread knowledge and avoid setting rules that harm people who are doing nothing wrong.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Marijuana Pessimism Is Promoting Ignorance

Free speech has a special virtue; it improves the chances that errors will be corrected. In a blog from early October, I praised the New York Times for its enterprise journalism focusing on the dangers of marijuana.

I thought these were new ideas, signaling to doctors the risks of marijuana. I was wrong. The research they assembled repeats the tired arguments of those worrywarts who see mostly danger from pot.

Peter Grinspoon, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, has written a book challenging the pessimists who see dangers from marijuana use. Like his father, Lester, whose famous 1971 book “Marihuana Reconsidered” was a foundational text of the drug reform movement, Peter argues that on balance the positives of marijuana are greater than the risks.

In his book, Seeing through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth about Marijuana, Dr. Grinspoon confronts those researchers, such as the ones the NY Times interviewed, who see grave risks and little benefit from the legalization of cannabis.

He starts the book with a family story demonstrating that the plant is medicine. It’s a tale that the researchers interviewed by the NY Times would find impossible to refute. Peter’s older brother developed a blood cancer requiring massive chemotherapy, but it couldn’t arrest the spread of leukemia. Peter asserts, convincingly, that cannabis kept his brother alive for months. It performed this task by combatting the side effects of chemotherapy.

“Without cannabis, Danny would be lying in his room with a towel over his head and a barf bucket next to his bed at the ready. With cannabis, he would be downstairs playing board games and wrestling with his younger twin brothers.” “Instead of barfing, he was eating.…the improvement in his quality of life was incalculable.”

Without a doubt, marijuana added months to the life of his brother. Surely, this effect is medicinal; it minimized the side effects of chemotherapy.

What angers Dr. Grinspoon is that throughout history the medical profession has recognized that tinctures of marijuana and the marijuana plant treat certain illnesses. Migraine headaches is just one example. When Congress took a conservative turn after the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, southern conservatives formed a voting bloc with Republicans. This coalition had a working majority that lasted decades. In 1937, Congress made marijuana illegal for the first time in medical history. The American Medical Association opposed the legislation, but the government agencies that had enforced alcohol prohibition and their scary stories convinced the lawmakers. Pot quickly became an illegal pleasure, and a new market monopoly was given to lawbreakers.

This change in attitude was stunning. Pharmacists and doctors for centuries had gotten positive results from medicine using cannabis. It is one of many benefits that humans have gotten from the hemp plant. Throughout human history, they have used the hemp plant for practical uses rope, shoes, and medicine. Archeologists have found artifacts that use hemp as long ago as ten thousand years.

Pessimistic medical researchers limit their research by focusing on memory and other work-related mental tasks. A comprehensive report in 2017 concluded “there is strong data for immediate impairment, but little to no data for lasting impairment.” The negative conclusions relied on selective data; had the researchers “looked at, creativity, humor, and insight,” Grinspoon suspects “there wouldn’t have been deficits, and people might have done significantly better than the norm.” In short, the pessimists are desperately hunting for reasons to conclude pot is bad.

Unsurprisingly, Peter Grinspoon offers a different conclusion: pot, like alcohol and food, works best if used in moderation. However, the pessimists are creating a real danger: ignorance. Too many doctors lack an understanding of the properties for good and bad of marijuana. They are unable to help their patients who use cannabis and can’t recommend this drug even when the benefits are clear.

Grinspoon’s book Seeing Through the Smoke seeks to help doctors and the public understand how they can get benefits from pot.  As a physician, he advises that pot sold in legal markets is tested and users are not exposed to “mold, heavy metals, and other contaminants.” It is a much safer product than the illegal substance.

Peter Grinspoon is trying to create a common language and values that allow the public to make informed choices and to create a common understanding that will lead to a new consensus.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

The Mistruths About Pot

The mistruths about pot

Dr Peter Grinspoon who writes for Substack (8/mo$80/yr) is on staff at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He comes from a family that has resisted stigmatizing persons who use drugs.  He and his father, Lester, criticize misleading propaganda exaggerating the dangers of drug use. He is a voice of calm who says that drug use is manageable for society and gives confidence to users that they can deal with their problems.

In this article, Dr. Grinspoon criticizes current definitions of Cannabis Use Disorder which formed the basis of a NY Times article warning of increased dangers from pot.

*

There is absolutely no question that cannabis can be addictive, but it is fiercely debated how addictive it truly is. According to the field of addiction psychiatry, a group of specialists who have generally been anti-cannabis for half a century and who have promoted many of the U.S. Government’s mistruths about cannabis in the past, “cannabis use disorder”, (CUD), a term used synonymously with cannabis addiction, is diagnosed objectively when patients fulfill a certain number of criteria over time that have been carefully validated (see below) — just as is done for addiction to opioids or alcohol.

Some of these symptoms that contribute to a diagnosis of cannabis addiction include tolerance, withdrawal, cravings, inability to control use, use in hazardous circumstances, and continued use despite negative consequences. This is not very different from how we diagnose other use disorders except that there are no provisions for medical cannabis patients who are getting needlessly saddled with a diagnosis of “cannabis addiction” merely because they have ‘tolerance’ and ‘withdrawal’. We all have tolerance and withdrawal to many of our prescribed medications – no one says you are addicted to your SSRI, or your coffee for that matter. When diagnosing opioid use disorder, these two qualifiers – tolerance and withdrawal – don’t count if the opioids are medically prescribed, because all patients would have tolerance and withdrawal but not all of them are addicted. So why wouldn’t the same be true for diagnosing cannabis addiction, for the millions of medical cannabis patient? In short, this is how the addiction specialists, operating under the hangover of the War on Drugs, have been (in my opinion) vastly overestimating the number of people with cannabis addiction, to the detriment of all involved.

According to the addiction psychiatrists, the consequences of having CUD can be quite severe (this is true), especially in teens and young adults who are particularly susceptible (this is true). CUD is associated with lower happiness, an unsatisfying social life, lack of career success, lower socioeconomic status, car crashes, emergency room visits, cognitive decline, problems with other drugs, other psychiatric diagnoses, suicide, and low motivation (though, these are misleading; the concept of “associated” is a big problem – it is not causation; other issues, such as poverty, can be an alternative explanation). According to many addiction specialists, use of cannabis should generally be discouraged, except, perhaps if the use is “medical” which they have been skeptical about (less and less so). They believe all drug use is bad (except, perhaps, the social use of alcohol, which caused 172,000 deaths last year).

Many addiction psychiatrists believe that CUD is extremely common and cite studies that show that CUD afflicts up to a quarter to a third of adult cannabis users (which is untrue). According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), “between 9.3% and 30.6% of American adults who use cannabis have CUD.” The fact that this range is gigantic—more than a factor of three begs the question of whether the criteria are somewhat, or possibly vastly, overinclusive and whether they are sensibly applicable to medical cannabis patients (they aren’t). Many are concerned that the legalization of cannabis will result in more cannabis users (this is true) and, consequently, more people that succumb to cannabis addiction (likely true – a proportion of people using any intoxicant get addicted). Regular cannabis users can get withdrawal symptoms which can make it harder to quit.

Many people in the cannabis community don’t believe that cannabis is addictive at all—they think it is just another bogus U.S. government propaganda point. Of note, it was a propaganda point, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. A common story is, “I used it for twenty years and then I was able to stop on a dime without any problems. How can it be addictive?” Others think it can be mildly or infrequently addicting, with an occasional person who goes off the rails. Cannabis proponents point out that the majority of studies of its addictiveness have been funded and conducted under the auspices of the War on Drugs, where there was, and still is, massive institutional pressure to demonstrate harm over benefits. (This is true).

How do we disentangle all of this?

What is the definition of cannabis addiction?

There are eleven criteria for CUD. A patient needs to have two out of the eleven of these criteria for at least a year to qualify as “addicted” to cannabis, accompanied by “significant impairment of functioning and distress.” Keep in mind that if you meet two or three criteria you have mild CUD, if you meet four or five you have moderate CUD, and six or more means severe CUD.

The 11 criteria are:

1. Use of cannabis for at least a one-year period, with the presence of at least two of the following symptoms, accompanied by significant impairment of functioning and distress.

2. Difficulty containing use of cannabis—the drug is used in larger amounts and over a longer period than intended.

3. Repeated failed efforts to discontinue or reduce the amount of cannabis that is used.

4. An inordinate amount of time is occupied acquiring, using, or recovering from the effects of cannabis.

5. Cravings or desires to use cannabis. This can include intrusive thoughts and images, and dreams about cannabis, or olfactory perceptions of the smell of cannabis, due to preoccupation with cannabis.

6. Continued use of cannabis despite adverse consequences from its use, such as criminal charges, ultimatums of abandonment from spouse/partner/friends, and poor productivity.

7. Other important activities in life, such as work, school, hygiene, and responsibility to family and friends, are superseded by the desire to use cannabis.

8. Cannabis is used in contexts that are potentially dangerous, such as operating a motor vehicle.

9. Use of cannabis continues despite awareness of physical or psychological problems attributed to use—e.g., anergia, amotivation, chronic cough.

10. Tolerance to cannabis, as defined by progressively larger amounts of cannabis needed to obtain the psychoactive effect experienced when use first commenced, or noticeably reduced effect of use of the same amount of cannabis.

11. Withdrawal, defined as the typical withdrawal syndrome associated with cannabis, or cannabis or a similar substance is used to prevent withdrawal symptoms.

What’s wrong with this?

This is a nuanced discussion which I go over it in granular detail in my recent book, “Seeing Through the Smoke.” The gist of it is:

There are many reasons why our definition of cannabis addiction is not only broken but has been harmful to people.  It is overly inclusive, which I will discuss below. When you give someone a definition of “addiction” (to anything…) when they aren’t addicted, it harms them. They are treated with stigma and judgment by their healthcare providers and are discriminated against by insurance companies. This can result in tangible harms. For example, it has been demonstrated that people who are labeled with any addiction are prescribed fewer pain medications by their doctors and are not treated with as much compassion. Doctors unfortunately share the same stigma against addiction that most other people do.

Dr. Staci Gruber is a brilliant researcher at Harvard Medical School and is the director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program. As she puts it,

As in the case of opioid use disorder, for example, tolerance and withdrawal criteria are not considered for individuals who are using opioids under appropriate medical supervision. With regard to cannabis, similar exclusions from DSM-5 criteria may need to be applied.

I’d get rid of the “may” part. In fact, in a 2013 paper, “DSM-5 Criteria for Substance Use Disorders: Recommendations and Rationale,” author Deborah Hasin, who has authored several of these studies implicating 30 percent of adult cannabis users as addicted, argues,

An important exception to making a diagnosis of DSM-5 substance use disorder with two criteria pertains to the supervised use of psychoactive substances for medical purposes, including stimulants, cocaine, opioids, nitrous oxide, sedative-hypnotic/anxiolytic drugs, and cannabis in some jurisdictions. These substances can produce tolerance and withdrawal as normal physiological adaptations when used appropriately for supervised medical purposes. With a threshold of two or more criteria, these criteria could lead to invalid substance use disorder diagnoses even with no other criteria met. Under these conditions, tolerance and withdrawal in the absence of other criteria do not indicate substance use disorders and should not be diagnosed as such. (emphasis added) If the patient is using benzodiazepines, opioids, or cannabis for legitimate medical purposes, we ought to completely ditch the criteria of tolerance or withdrawal, as these are intrinsic parts of many medicines that we routinely use.

Even the person giving us studies that demonstrate a 30% addiction rate among adult users of cannabis thinks the definitions are broken. (And what does “in some jurisdictions” have to do with anything? Either cannabis is or isn’t a medicine—it’s a pharmacological thing, not something decided by the legislature or voters in Mississippi or Vermont. If a policeman is chasing me and I make it over the border from Idaho into Oregon, are my tolerance and withdrawal suddenly valid and noncontributory to a diagnosis of addiction?)

For all the reasons cited above, Dr. Gruber concludes,

CUD is likely a unique construct among those using cannabis medically, and existing tools developed for use in recreational consumers do not appear to be reliable, valid measures for assessing CUD in medical cannabis patients.

I believe that estimates of CUD have been wildly inflated by roping in millions who use cannabis medically (often with great benefit). I would abandon the concept of CUD altogether and start from scratch. We need to create an untainted measure of cannabis addiction that accommodates the current realities of the drug to better target (and not mistarget) treatment.

How I would fix the definition of cannabis addiction

Given that no one is going to ditch this definition, and that some people clearly do get into trouble with cannabis, how can we adjust the sensitivity of the definition of CUD so it better reflects reality?

I would start by eliminating the categories of withdrawal and tolerance. This makes sense given how many useful and commonplace medications have tolerance and withdrawal as common features of their use, such as opioids, benzodiazepines, and antidepressants. This change would help avoid ensnaring the many patients who are using cannabis for medical reasons, or for reasons of wellness and enhancement, into an unhelpful category of “addicted.”

Next, I would go back to the widely accepted tradition that addiction is a clinically diagnosed disease. We should get rid of this habit of diagnosing millions of people by computer-assisted telephone interviews which, with cannabis, just appears to create this hypothetically addicted body of people who don’t seem to materially exist.

Next, I would increase the number of criteria one needs to qualify for CUD. There is evidence to suggest that a higher number of criteria results in a more accurate diagnosis. The more criteria you require, the more cases you might miss, but the more diagnostic certainty you have for the cases you have diagnosed. Given that we appear to be over-diagnosing cannabis addiction, this seems like a good trade-off, as it would help us to be more certain about the cases we diagnose. It would also help the patients take the diagnosis seriously. If we get rid of tolerance and withdrawal (so there are now nine not eleven criteria) and made it so that you needed four out of nine to qualify (instead of the current two out of eleven), this would be much more accurate. If we did this, a more reasonable number of people given a diagnosis of CUD would actually have a clinically meaningful CUD.

In fact, some recent studies have shown that it is almost entirely “severe CUD,” meaning six or more criteria met (of the eleven), that is associated with psychosocial problems. In my schema (without withdrawal or tolerance), that would equate to needing to meet four out of nine criteria. The main difference is that if we tightened this up, we wouldn’t needlessly be diagnosing, pathologizing, stigmatizing, and, as a consequence, harming so many people who are using cannabis without problems and with benefit.

Further, I would search for a way to incorporate the positives of cannabis use into our diagnostic considerations, to get a more nuanced view of why someone is using cannabis. I understand that this isn’t a common feature of diagnosing an addiction, but it is the only way to make our approach to cannabis—which is a medicine as well as a drug of potential misuse, and which can have positives and negatives at the same time—remotely coherent. There was a recent, excellent article about this, “Harm reduction isn’t enough: Introducing the concept of Mindful Consumption and Benefit Maximization (MCBM)’.

My personal opinion is that cannabis is about as addicting as caffeine. People get extremely dependent on caffeine, yet still manage to enjoy fulfilling lives, not unlike the use of cannabis for many people. Caffeine usually isn’t particularly disruptive, unless you develop palpitations, heartburn, anxiety, or insomnia. Heavy, regular users of either cannabis or caffeine are susceptible to symptoms of cravings, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms. The use of neither should be stigmatized or criminalized.

Finally – there a misconception that “all drug use is bad”  under any circumstances (except, of course, alcohol…) which I disagree with, but that is for another day.

Posted on by Nathan Riley · 2 Comments

Don’t Be Fooled: Marjiuana Isn’t Always Fun. For Some It Carries Serious Risks

Legalization is no panacea. Simply lifting the criminal penalties creates new problems, not insurmountable but which require community attention.

Nobody knows this better than Portland, Oregon, where the decriminalization of all drugs became a major source of public dissatisfaction. As might be expected, Covid added to the city’s problems, but national attention focused on the open-air use of drugs, making it a political issue. So widespread was the discontent that the City abandoned its governmental structure. Among the changes, City council districts replaced at-large elections.

A spectacular and thoughtful article has brought similar attention to the problems tied to the sharp rise in marijuana use. About 4.5 million people aged 18 and over use marijuana daily or near daily. In 2002, approximately 1.5% of adults 26 and over were daily users. Today, it has skyrocketed to an estimated 7%.

In a major piece of enterprise journalism, the Times spoke to close to 600 users and discovered frequent illnesses in states across the nation. The journalists described widespread use even among users experiencing negative reactions, who often didn’t connect their symptoms to marijuana use. Although alarmed, many experts the Times consulted remained supporters of legalization. However, every one of them wanted wider recognition of the medical problems, which are often unknown to doctors and emergency rooms.

The newly legal businesses frequently offer products whose potency would give most stoners concern. New users without marijuana experience were vaping with products that had a 90% THC concentration. Anybody who’s hung out with drug users has met some people with a compulsion to persistently seek stronger drugs in the hopes of experiencing better highs.

Current legalization policies not only give such adventurers a free hand to try more potent versions of pot but also permit the marketing of these products to persons with limited experience who are unable to recognize ill effects, even dangers. Legal weed dispensaries don’t only sell grass that is recently harvested; they also sell hybrid products that provide an ever-increasing kick. In short, the Times team described a laissez-faire market lacking regulation.

Think about what would happen if liquor stores had no idea whether their whiskey was 80 proof, 100 proof, or 120 proof. Liquor products are standardized to protect buyers. They know what to expect because government rules mandated be presented to the consumer.

Pot is sold in a variety of products, sometimes from pot plants, other times from hemp, and undoubtedly many products in a pot store are cooked and unnatural.

As people grow older, they select their attitudes towards beer, wine, and liquor. A growing number of young adults simply don’t drink. Bar or restaurant patrons frequently encounter servers who don’t use alcoholic drinks.

What is surprising is the extent to which users experience problems that are often associated with booze: vomiting, mental confusion, and even cause psychosis. But all too often the public believes pot is harmless, which is often true but not always.

A more serious illness tied to marijuana is cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS). A wide range of symptoms mark the syndrome:  “nausea, vomiting and pain… extreme dehydration, seizures, kidney failure.” Even cases of cardiac arrest are reported. According to the three reporters on the Times team, doctors and users are unfamiliar with the connection between these symptoms and marijuana use.

Legalization properly done will inform the makers of marijuana products, the medical community, and consumers about the risks. The bottom line is that pot and other psychotropic drugs should be treated with respect, and many should stay away.

The outlook is cloudy. Congress can’t even agree on legislation that gives sellers and growers full access to banking facilities. Many people still attribute magic powers to pot and see it as a life-destroying force. The great merit of the Times article is the clarity with which it recognizes the pleasures experienced by potheads while offering specific and detailed information about how things can go wrong. The impact of the Times story, presumably the first of many, on the legalization community is uncertain. Many, including this writer, will think it’s an argument to make pot use a crime. It took me three readings to realize that Megan Twohey, Danielle Ivory, and Carson Kessler had fairly weighed the contentious arguments and found problems that any fair-minded person would want to address.