Each year, around April 20, members of Congress express their support for federally decriminalizing marijuana. Recreational marijuana is legal in 17 states as well as Washington, D.C. In one of those states, Colorado, LivWell Enlightened Health is rolling out a television commercial campaign to promote its dispensary.
It’s the first known marijuana TV ad campaign in the state and an indication that the federal government needs to ban marijuana ads on television and crack down on any violators.
The primary issue here isn’t that adults will see these commercials and decide they want to try marijuana for the first time. Rather, children watch television, and regularly seeing marijuana advertisements normalizes it for them. Existing data shows that exposure to medical marijuana advertising makes children more likely to use marijuana and have a positive opinion of it, according to the RAND Corporation. There aren’t medical marijuana ads on television, but if there are in the future, that could certainly allow this trend to continue.
That’s a problem because marijuana is not harmless. We don’t know all of the long-term health effects, but it can increase depression and anxiety, among other problems, not to mention that there is the threat of driving accidents.
There’s a major difference between saying that people don’t deserve to go to prison for smoking a plant or eating some candy with THC in it as long as they’re not harming anyone else and letting businesses essentially market this product to minors. The latter is about children not understanding the health effects of the substance they are using.
Mitigating negative health effects is why tobacco advertisements have been banned on television in the United States since the 1970s. The World Health Organization states that banning tobacco advertising typically reduces consumption in a country by 7%. That makes sense because, in 2018, a Pediatrics study found that teenagers who watched tobacco product ads online were more likely to try tobacco products and use them more often.
Thankfully, tobacco use has been on the decline in the U.S. for years.
Additionally, there is evidence that people who see more alcohol ads are more likely to drink underage and are therefore more likely to abuse the substance later in life. Ideally, the U.S. would also outlaw alcohol advertising to prevent further future abuse.
In the coming years, more states will likely legalize recreational marijuana, and the federal government will try to decriminalize it. If this happens, politicians on both sides should be ready to try to reduce some of the downsides that may arise.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
