The costs and benefits of cannabis control policies

Abstract

As is the case for most drugs, cannabis use has costs and benefits, and so do the policies that attempt to minimize the first and maximize the second. This article summarizes what we know about the harmful effects of recreational cannabis use and the benefits of medical cannabis use under the policy of prohibition that prevailed in developed countries until 2012. It outlines three broad ways in which cannabis prohibition may be relaxed, namely, the depenalization of personal possession and use, the legalization of medical use, and the legalization of adult recreational use. It reviews evidence to date on the impacts of each of these forms of liberalization on the costs and benefits of cannabis use. It makes some plausible conjectures about the future impacts of the commercialization of cannabis using experience from the commercialization of the alcohol, tobacco, and gambling industries. Cannabis policy entails unavoidable trade-offs between competing social values in the face of considerable uncertainty about the effects that more liberal cannabis policies will have on cannabis use and its consequences for better or worse.

Pros and Cons of the Cannabinoid System in Cancer: Focus on Hematological Malignancies

“…Finally, chronic cannabis intake increases the risk of cannabis dependence, which is related to several negative psychosocial outcomes such as cognitive deficiency, psychoses and depressive and anxiety alterations, poor educational outcomes, and antisocial behavior [38,53,54].…”

Minimizing policy-biased appraisals of the evidence on cannabis and psychosis

“…Ideally democratic pluralist societies should decide on an appropriate cannabis policy by weighing the costs and benefits of cannabis use and cannabis control policies ( 38 , 39 ). Policy makers need to weigh the harms that may arise from cannabis prohibition, such as, criminal records for cannabis users, production of a large illicit market, police corruption and discriminatory enforcement of the criminal law ( 38 ). The costs of cannabis prohibition and the potential benefits of regulating and taxing cannabis have led a majority of US citizens to support the legalization of adult cannabis use ( 40 ).…”

The Legalization of Medical Marijuana: A Human Rights Law Perspective

“…The international trend is clear: countries are openly approving policies that would have been unthinkable just five or ten years ago. The nations that legalize marijuana first will provide, perhaps at some risk to their own populations, an external benefit to the rest of the world in the form of knowledge, however the experiments turn out (Hall, 2020).…”