Winners this Election Day ranged from governors-elect Ralph Northam and Phil Murphy to new Virginia state rep. Danica Roem, far from the first transgender legislator in the land, and the 93-year-old new mayor of Tinton Falls, New Jersey. But they weren’t the only ones: The legal marijuana industry made significant gains.
Murphy, New Jersey’s new governor, favors legalization, reportedly planning to set loose recreational weed for 21-and-overs all across the Garden State within his first 100 days. He promises tax revenue from the reliably profitable new industry will fund education and public employee pensions. Outgoing governor and former White House drug czar Chris Christie takes a hardline battling addiction, and isn’t a favorite of the pot-smoking community, where denial of THC’s addictive properties is a potent shibboleth.
Leafly, a High Times-like blog with detailed scrolling coverage of pot-related legislation, won’t miss the buzzkill. Calling Chrisie “the nation’s most notorious prohibitionist,” their election night write-up referred to the frustrations of fighting him “over medical marijuana for thousands and thousands of years.” Which actually makes total sense when you consider that one of the common side-effects of toking reefer is “a subjective impression of elapsed time”—making minutes sometimes seem like hours, or term lengths like millennia.
Two medical marijuana reform measures narrowly won at the ballot box in Detroit, relaxing the rules that govern who can open a cannabis dispensary during the Motor City’s hipster flourishing. And voters in Athens County, Ohio, overwhelmingly chose to lift penalties for possession, which remains at least a misdemeanor everywhere else in the state, except Toledo. The ballot measure brought by The Athens Cannabis Ordinance, and cheekily touted as “TACO!” in get-out-the-vote campaigns, won nearly 77 percent of the vote in the college town.
This—according to Dr. Sion Kim Harris, pediatrics professor at Harvard and co-director of the Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research at Boston Children’s Hospital—is exactly why voters should not decide: It’s too easily to entice people to the polls.
Before Massachusetts voted on legalization last year, “I personally received a number of mailings that were glossy pictures of doctors and nurses saying we need to make marijuana legalized, never mind that we already had medical marijuana legalized,” Harris recalls. “This kind of issue is not great for a ballot question.”
The brisk progress of decriminalization, followed by recreational legalization, responds to “the pressure of the market to make money and increase the customer base, for an industry based on addictive behavior.” And the market always answers back. “That’s when you have the creation of highly potent edibles that look like candy,” Harris said, referring to a recent study of 30 million legal cannabis sales found that the potency of available products and instances of THC-induced trips to the ER increased dramatically in Washington state after the legalization of recreational marijuana.
Harris is a little more resigned to the inevitable than she was when last we spoke—on the high holiday 4/20, as it happened—railing, back then, against the dawn of “Big Tobacco redux” and the big-moneyed pot lobby’s disregard for public health. The commercial manipulation of potency and packaging, and adverse health effects the full extent of which we can only imagine, “That’s just what’s going to be happening nationally,” she says. “It’s a brave new world.”
