A new report from the Colorado Retail Marijuana Public Health Advisory Committee tells us that among 18-25 years olds, 13 percent report using marijuana daily or near-daily. Mark Kleiman is taken aback that this has gotten hardly any attention:
We know from other studies by Beau Kilmer and his group at RAND that daily/near-daily smokers consume about three times as much cannabis per use-day as less frequent smokers, enough to be measurably impaired (even if not subjectively stoned) for most of their waking hours….The National Survey on Drug Use and Health finds that about one-half of daily or near-daily smokers meet the diagnostic criteria for Substance Use Disorder. That’s a frightening share of users, and of the total population, to be engaging in such worrisome behavior.
….More and more people using cannabis more and more often is a trend that pre-dates legalization and is not restricted to states that have legalized….What is clear is that lower prices…make it easier for users to slip into heavy daily use. Indeed, that’s the main — some of us would say the only significant — risk of legalization. That risk could be reduced by using taxes to prevent the price collapse. So a report on the effects of legalization that neglects heavy use is like a review of the last performance of “Our American Cousin” that doesn’t mention John Wilkes Booth.
That sounds like a lot. On the other hand, if half of daily marijuana users typically have substance use disorders, that’s about 6.5 percent in Colorado. Here are the national figures for the past decade:
The Colorado figure is higher than than the national figure, but not hugely higher. It’s probably not a reason to panic, but it does bear watching.
The kind of people who read this blog are probably in favor of marijuana legalization—as I am—largely because they’re the kind of people who use it occasionally and don’t see a lot of harm in it. But like alcohol, there’s a certain share of the population that will fall into addiction, and that share is likely to increase as marijuana prices come down. There’s never a free lunch.
