Public Policy

When businesses are failing, they’ll try anything to earn back some of their investment.

We focus on the drug, as if someone who uses heroin, for instance, can’t also have a problem with alcohol, or sleeping pills, or methamphetamine, or this new, more potent form of marijuana that’s showing up everywhere.

We will have to deal with electronic smoking, which has exploded among young people even as cigarette use has declined.

We should remember that Ohio’s Republican governor had to go against the wishes of many in his own party in order to achieve this.

Not Latin American cartels or Afghan warlords, but advocates for opioid treatment of chronic pain, and pharmaceutical firms with a substantial financial interest in selling opioids.

…if the ground is now shifting to other drugs, then what are we doing in response to that?

…tolerable when we’re talking about window fasteners or computer mice but surely not when the product in question directly affects our health or even our survival.

If someone is experiencing problems with pot, fine, get them help. But locking them up? Feels like smashing a bedbug with a sledgehammer.

That’s not to say the perceptions of cannabis as health-improving aren’t important, but post-legalization, it’s mostly a marketing tool.

What legalization can’t do is fix any problems inherent in drug use itself.