The Editorial the New York Times Should Have Run
The New York Times published an editorial on February 9th arguing that America has a marijuana problem. By the time most of us finished our morning coffee, the amplification had already begun. Kevin Sabet was on Fox News. Conservative wire services were pushing near-identical stories across affiliate networks. Influencers who rarely cover cannabis policy suddenly had takes. The language traveling through the amplification chain was curiously consistent for something that had just been published. A campaign infrastructure was being activated in real time.
SAM Action has been sustaining repeal campaigns in Massachusetts, Maine, and Arizona simultaneously. It contributed $1.55 million as the sole disclosed donor in Massachusetts and $2 million in Maine, where the campaign ultimately missed its signature deadline. The organization operates as a 501(c)(4), which means the funding behind those efforts stays outside public view by design. Within 72 hours of the Times editorial, a mature messaging apparatus was fully deployed across television, wire services, and social media. Voters trying to evaluate that response have no way to know who paid for it. That is the structure SAM chose.
So I decided to write the editorial the Times should have run. This is less rebuttal than diagnosis.
America Has a Marijuana Problem. Now Do the Work.
“It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.”
Before legalization, cannabis was already everywhere and accountable to no one. Products moved without production or testing standards, without reliable potency information, without labels that could guide a consumer or a patient. Youth access ran through social networks and illicit channels indifferent to age. Emergency rooms documented inconsistently because patients had legal reasons to omit what they used and clinicians had financial reasons not to press. The data stayed thin because the incentives to disclose stayed thin.
That was the reality of our public health system. It was managed ignorance, and it had powerful defenders.
This board has followed this debate for more than a decade. In 2014, we argued that cannabis prohibition had failed in ways that rhymed uncomfortably with Prohibition itself. We stand by the logic of that argument, and we stand by the responsibility that comes with it.
The country has been here before. New measurement systems produce new numbers, and new numbers produce new panic, and panic produces bad policy. The question worth asking is not whether the data is rising. It is what the data looked like before anyone was required to collect it.
Prohibition did not fail neutrally. It was enforced selectively, in predictable neighborhoods, against predictable people, at rates that had nothing to do with who was actually using cannabis. Black and Latino communities absorbed the arrests, the records, the collateral consequences, and the generational disruption while consumption continued across every zip code in America. The supply chain that served everyone operated without testing, without labeling, without any obligation to the people it sold to. There was no public health system. There was punishment for some and impunity for others, and a product market answerable to no one.
Legalization was supposed to end that bargain. In many places it has. In others, the legal market arrived without the governance infrastructure needed to make it mean something, and the gap between what legalization promised and what legislatures actually built became the story critics are now telling.
That gap is real. Returning to what preceded it is not the answer to it.
Walk into a licensed retailer in Massachusetts and walk into a convenience store in a state with no hemp rules and you are looking at two entirely different regulatory realities. Add the illicit market that has survived and you have three distinct product systems operating simultaneously under the same cultural headline. Critics have found it useful to blur that distinction. That blurring is doing a lot of work in the repeal argument.
Child-resistant packaging. Dosage information. A warning label. These are the tools a regulated market supplies and a shadow market never will.
Start with gas station gummies, because that is where most people's anxiety lives. Those products exist because Congress created a definitional loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill that allowed hemp-derived intoxicants into retail channels never designed for them, with inconsistent age controls and uneven testing requirements. That is a federal drafting problem. It has nothing to do with what a licensed dispensary in a regulated state is required to do, and everything to do with what happens when Congress creates a product category and then fails to govern it. The serious hemp operators have understood this. Unregulated competition undercuts their prices, erodes consumer trust, and shines a spotlight on the glaring lack of consistent oversight. Responsible operators want enforcement. It is what protects their investment and justifies the regulatory burden they accepted when they entered the legal market.
The illicit market is a separate problem entirely - a legacy one. It predates legalization, it survived legalization, and it will survive any effort to repeal. It operates outside every standard, answers to price alone, and has no mechanism for accountability to the people it sells to. No ballot initiative touches it. Prohibition already failed to eliminate it once. There is no reason to believe a second attempt produces a different result.
Licensed adult-use cannabis operates inside a different framework entirely. State regulators require testing, mandate labeling, set packaging standards, enforce age verification, conduct compliance inspections, and issue fines. They revoke licenses, too. That framework varies by state, of course. The gaps are real and some are serious. It also represents a set of tools that prohibition never supplied and that any serious public health agenda should be working to strengthen, not dismantle.
Legalization also created something prohibition never could: a lawful workforce and a tax base built on daylight. The U.S. legal cannabis industry supports roughly 425,000 full-time equivalent jobs, even after a modest hiring pullback in 2024 as markets matured and operators tightened margins. That is compliance staff, lab workers, logistics, retail, cultivation, security, accounting, construction, and the long vendor chain that follows any regulated supply chain into existence.
Revenue tells the same story. Legal sales have grown into a national-scale consumer category measured in tens of billions of dollars, with states capturing recurring tax revenue that gets appropriated like every other public dollar. Since adult-use markets began in 2014, states have collected more than $24.7 billion in cannabis tax revenue. That money funds ordinary government functions and targeted programs depending on the state. In every case it represents commerce that can now be seen, taxed, and held to account.
Then comes the part critics often pretend not to see. Legality changes behavior beyond the point of sale. It changes whether a patient tells a doctor the truth. It changes whether a parent calls poison control quickly instead of hoping a problem disappears. It changes whether a worker lists their real job on a lease application. Stigma drops, disclosure rises, and the public gets more honest data. That is society beginning to accept and admit what it used to deny.
The legal market also pulls along the economy that never makes a headline: landlords, electricians, HVAC contractors, software developers, packaging suppliers, testing equipment manufacturers, attorneys, accountants, insurers, and local retailers that benefit from foot traffic and adjacent spending. The point is not to romanticize cannabis. The point is to describe the world as it exists. A large, legitimate sector has formed. Governance now determines whether it becomes a stable civic asset or a perpetual political punching bag.
Asking voters to evaluate all three of these as a single policy choice produces the wrong outcome. It also allows the legitimate health, safety, and wellness concerns to get lost in the argument about which market is responsible for them.
It is true that emergency room encounters have risen in many jurisdictions. Pediatric exposures, overwhelmingly edibles and overwhelmingly preventable, are not abstractions for the families who lived them. Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome tracks heavy, high-potency use patterns that a well-designed market should actively discourage. Crash analysis shows a modest signal after retail onset that still requires careful disaggregation from confounders before it can support specific policy conclusions. The psychosis literature has grown more serious with time. Recent population-level work from Ontario found that cannabis use disorder accounts for a meaningfully larger share of schizophrenia cases in post-legalization settings than it did before, a finding the researchers themselves note cannot establish causation but that no serious potency policy can afford to dismiss.
The regulated market exists precisely because these problems need somewhere to go.
Packaging and serving-size rules reduce pediatric exposure. Honest labeling gives consumers and patients usable information. Potency frameworks can align product categories with actual risk profiles. Public education can target the behaviors that drive the most harm, heavy daily use, early-onset use, driving decisions made too close to consumption. None of that works if the license doesn't mean anything. The operators who understand that have the most to lose when the ones who don't make the news.
Before legalization, cannabis use was chronically undercounted. Patients didn't disclose. Clinicians didn't ask. Emergency rooms coded around it. When legal risk disappeared, so did the incentive to hide it. Doctors started asking, patients began answering without stigma, and the surveillance systems built around the legal market started capturing what the illicit market never wanted to. Some of what looks like a surge in the data is, in fact, a surge. Some of it is the first honest count. Treating every rising number as evidence of catastrophe, or every measurement artifact as absolution, produces the same result: a policy argument built on something other than reality.
There is a harder governance problem underneath all of this that nobody is talking about yet. Cannabis and intoxicating hemp now touch public health, consumer protection, tax administration, clinical practice, and social equity simultaneously. A single licensing agency in each individual state cannot do all of those jobs with equal competence or equal objectivity. Asking one to try is how gaps become crises. The industry and its regulators need to begin designing structures that reflect the actual breadth of the task before circumstances force the conversation.
We argued in 2014 that prohibition had failed. We believe that still. What the intervening decade has clarified is that legalization without adequate governance is its own kind of failure. The work we declined to finish is the only honest response to that.
“The disorder visible in the market today is not evidence that the states failed. It is the entirely predictable result of federal abdication meeting state-level improvisation at scale.”
Congress created this market by failing to act for decades, then handed the problem to states with no federal framework, no research infrastructure, and no coherent definition of what intoxicating means under federal law. The states did not wait. They built licensing systems, testing requirements, labeling standards, and enforcement infrastructure from scratch, without federal guidance, without federal funding, and without any resolution of the fundamental contradiction between state law and the federal Schedule I designation that still governs how banks, employers, and courts treat cannabis. They picked up the pieces Congress left on the floor. The disorder visible in the market today is not evidence that they failed. It is the entirely predictable result of federal abdication meeting state-level improvisation at scale.
Congress now faces the mature version of the problem it created. Hemp is an agricultural product and should be regulated as one. Cannabinoid products designed to intoxicate are consumer products and should be governed with the same honesty about risk that applies to alcohol and tobacco. Cannabis with demonstrated therapeutic value belongs in an inclusive healthcare system, accessible through the same channels as any other medicine. Regulate each of these things as what it actually is, and the illicit market loses most of the advantages it currently enjoys. It cannot compete on price alone when the legal market is accessible, honest, and fairly taxed.
The social equity dimension cannot be an afterthought. Decades of enforcement fell on communities that never disproportionately used cannabis, only disproportionately paid for it. Acknowledging that history is not a political gesture. It is a precondition for building a regulatory system the public can trust.
“They propose a return to a system that failed on every measure they claim to care about, that punished the wrong people, protected no one, and conducted the entire enterprise in the dark.”
None of this looks like the governance that came before it. It requires coordination across agencies with different mandates, different expertise, and different constituencies. It requires the federal government to distinguish between a hemp farmer, a beverage manufacturer, a dispensary operator, and a medical provider, and to write rules that reflect those distinctions. It requires Washington to become a partner to the states that did the hard work in its absence rather than an obstacle to what they built.
The repeal campaigns active today in Massachusetts, Arizona, and elsewhere are not a serious response to any of this. They do not address the federal loophole that produced the hemp market disorder they cite as evidence. They do not touch the illicit market. They do not propose a governance structure, a research agenda, or a path toward equity. They propose a return to a system that failed on every measure they claim to care about, that punished the wrong people, protected no one, and conducted the entire enterprise in the dark.
Public health does not succeed in the shadows. Social justice does not succeed in the shadows. Governing does not succeed in the shadows. The country has the data, the legal infrastructure, and the public mandate to do something better than what came before. The only thing missing is the willingness to finish what was started.
