Why America Is Switching From Booze to Weed

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1:13Derek Thompson: I've been thinking recently about the end of booze. Total beer consumption recently hit a 21st century low in America. Many distillers and wine vineyards are reportedly in crisis. And that's because the share of Americans who report that they drink recently hit a record low, going back to the 1930s, according to surveys by Gallup. Most social changes happen slowly, but the turn against alcohol has been remarkably sudden. The share of Americans who say that a drink or two a day is, quote, bad for their health has doubled in just the last decade. When I turned 18 in 2004, fewer than 30 % of Americans under 30 said moderate drinking was bad for their health.

1:57Derek Thompson: Now that number has more than doubled to 66%. At the same time that booze has fallen in popularity, something else has happened, something that's never happened before in American history. Weed, pot, marijuana, cannabis, whatever you want to call it, has officially overtaken alcohol and cigarettes as the nation's most popular daily drug. This, too, has been a remarkably sudden shift. As recently as the 1990s, the number of Americans who smoked cigarettes or drank every day exceeded the number of daily cannabis users by a factor of 40. But as the researcher Charles Fain Lehmann has written, quote,

2:47Derek Thompson: And what's so bad about that, you might think? In fact, you might even be inclined to call it progress. Cigarettes are one of the most effective cancer delivery systems we've ever studied. Alcohol abuse and addiction is extremely common. The CDC estimates that cigarettes and excessive alcohol use together account for nearly 700 ,000 annual deaths. That is almost exactly equivalent to the population of Washington, D.C., where I live. Ten years ago, it was broadly assumed that the rise of cannabis would replace those harmful addictions with a more harmless habit. In 2014, the New York Times published a six-part series that argued for repealing a marijuana ban.

3:31Derek Thompson: They described marijuana addiction and dependence as, quote, relatively minor problems. They quoted cannabis advocates, who said marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring health benefits. They doubted. Well, ten years later, their predictions don't entirely look accurate. Weed is everywhere now. The number of total and daily users has surged. The number of dispensaries has increased. But so have hospital visits and addiction stories, and in some cases, psychosis. Even the same institutions that called for repealing marijuana laws are now acknowledging that things have maybe gotten out of hand.

4:07Derek Thompson: In February, the New York Times editorial board published an essay announcing that, quote, it's time for America to admit that it has a marijuana problem. And it's not just the New York Times. After decades of steadily increasing support for legal marijuana, the age of legalization has actually coincided with a mild backlash. Support for cannabis appears to have peaked, and Americans are becoming somewhat more negative about the overall effects of cannabis. Now, I don't want anybody listening to think that I'm some weed abolitionist here. I'll be the first to testify that a bit of indica on a Friday or Saturday night, paired with a movie with exceptional cinematography, say, little Roger Deakins scoop of ice cream, maybe three.

4:50Derek Thompson: I mean, we are talking about heaven on earth here. But when you legalize a substance or an activity, whether it's weed or gambling, you equally legalize both its moderate and its excessive outcomes. Today, we are clearly seeing much more frequent use of much more potent cannabis. Frequency of use and potency are easy things to measure when we think about the possibility that America is effectively switching from booze to weed. But I'm also interested in what's not so easy to measure, like socialization. Just thinking about my own life, I drink to enjoy myself with other people, and I tend to smoke to enhance the experience of being alone.

5:34Derek Thompson: with a movie. Apparently, my experience isn't so unusual. According to Casey Creswell, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, most alcohol is consumed socially, and it makes us social. In one study of hers, 720 drinkers were put in groups of strangers and given a cranberry vodka cocktail or a cranberry-flavored placebo. Their social interactions were recorded and systematically coded by researchers. From the abstract, quote, alcohol consumption enhanced individual and group level behaviors associated with positive affect, reduced individual level behaviors associated with negative affect, and elevated self-reported bonding.

6:19Derek Thompson: End quote. In short, alcohol just sort of helps strangers have a good time. Her studies have found that alcohol doesn't just make people feel loose and happy in a crowd, it increases smiling. According to some studies, it smooths over the gaps in small talk, easing bonding among strangers. Cannabis, by contrast, is more likely to be used in isolation or among smaller groups of friends who are getting high together. If alcohol is a drug for bonding with strangers, cannabis seems more suited for deepening one's experience with people or movies that you've already selected. At a time when people are socializing less and spending more time alone, I think it's worth thinking through the fact that each era of American life seems to get the drug it deserves.

7:09Derek Thompson: The highly social mid-century years were typified by cigarettes and booze, which made us wired and lubricated for social gatherings. It is notable and interesting to me that the drug of the moment is a drug more often used for curating a carefully selected experience of interiority rather than giving ourselves over to the uncertainty of strangers. Today, we have two guests to talk about this age of legal cannabis. Jonathan Calkins is a drug policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon, and Bo Kilmer is the co-director of RAND Drug Policy research. Today's episode is trying to answer a big question, or several big questions.

7:54Derek Thompson: Is America switching from booze to weed? What is gained and lost in that switch? And what is the legalization of cannabis doing to America? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Planning Question.

8:35Derek Thompson: Jonathan Calkins, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you. Great to be here. Beau Kilmer, welcome to the show. Great to be with you both. John, starting with you, alcohol is old, but what about cannabis? Were the founding fathers getting high, or is this a relatively young drug in American history? Cannabis is a new drug with an old history. It's been around for literally thousands of years, and your reference to Founding Fathers has its roots in the fact that the cannabis plant was central to the economy back in the day. It was used to make rope and canvas material for sales until we got much better materials.

9:11But that's not the same drug, and it was not being used as an intoxicant. Intoxicating effects are far more recent, like the last hundred years. And really, it only became a central issue for society in the 1960s. Even from the 1930s and 1960s, it was not in everyday folks' lives. That's a more recent effect.

9:37Derek Thompson: So, Bo, filling out that history, in 1915, California became the first state to criminalize cannabis. By the 1930s, most states had done the same during the Prohibition era. President Nixon, when he signed the Controlled Substances Act, was caught on tape saying that he knew marijuana wasn't particularly dangerous, but, quote, I know most of the kids are for legalizing it, but on the other hand, it's the wrong signal at this time, end quote. In the last few decades, millions of people have been arrested for the sale and use of marijuana since Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, but it's really only in the last 10 or 15 years that we've gotten this wave of state-by-state legalization.

10:19Derek Thompson: I'd love you to help us fill out this modern history. What motivated this recent wave of state-by-state legalization? What has happened? Well, look, people have been debating legalization for decades in dorm rooms and at dinner parties. And then look, in the mid-1990s, California became the first state to allow cannabis to be used for medical purposes. And then that began to spread throughout many parts of the country. But it wasn't until around 2009, 2010 that the conversation started to get serious about legalizing cannabis for any reason. And here in California, where I am, there was a serious piece of legislation introduced in the state legislature in 2009.

11:03Derek Thompson: And then there were discussions about there being this ballot initiative in 2010 to legalize, which made it to the ballot, but it didn't pass. But that really kind of increased the amount of discussion that was happening about cannabis policy. And then it was in 2012 that both Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize. It's not just cannabis use or cannabis possession. They allow for-profit companies to produce and sell. So they were the first two, and then some other states jumped on board in 2014. And today, about half of U.S. states have legalized for adult use purposes. About 40 have legalized for medical purposes.

11:44Derek Thompson: And yeah, roughly more than half of the U.S. population now lives in states that allow cannabis to be sold for any reason if you're 21 and older. And in terms of the motivation, would you say that it was mostly motivated by consumer groups saying, we want to use this stuff, please legalize it, don't arrest us or people trying to sell it to us? Or was there also a strong corporate lobbying group that said, look, we have an opportunity to sell this and make money, which, by the way, you, the state, could then tax and then be able to spend on education or health care or roads? How would you sort of decompose the motivation consumers versus corporations?

12:29Derek Thompson: Well, there were multiple kind of reasons that were touted by advocates for legalizing. The first was just to reduce the number of arrests. I mean, we get to the mid-1990s, 2000s. I mean, you had hundreds of thousands of people being arrested for minor cannabis possession. So there was that motive and also because of the racial disparities in arrest. So that was a big part of it. But then obviously people said, well, why are we allowing people to spend all this money with organized crime and having this money go into illegal crime groups? Why shouldn't we just tax some of this and bring it back to the government?

13:06Derek Thompson: So you had that, but you're right about the business interests. And this is where it's interesting. As I mentioned, most states that have legalized for adult use had already legalized for medical purposes. And so in a lot of these places, especially in California, I mean, you had hundreds of dispensaries. And a lot of these dispensaries saw it as an opportunity to expand their market by really pushing for adult use legalization. And you see this in multiple states where industries then, hey, we already have medical. Why don't we just expand that to adult use? And hey, why don't you grandfather us medical companies in so we can get the first shot at this new batch of consumers?

13:48Derek Thompson: And John, before I throw it back to you, Bo, I want you to comment on the 2018 Farm Bill, which had a surprising effect on sort of accidentally legalizing a whole swath of this cannabis industry. What happened in 2018 with the Farm Bill? Yeah. So while you have all this happening with adult use legalization and medical legalization, at the federal level, as part of the Farm Bill, they were trying to create a distinction between what we kind of think about as cannabis or hemp or cannabis or marijuana, kind of what gets you high, and then industrial hemp. And it all comes from the same plant, the cannabis sativa elk.

14:28Derek Thompson: So what they did in that bill is they created this threshold. They said if the plant or its derivatives have less than or equal to 0.3 % delta 9 THC, the main intoxicating component of cannabis, that has less than or equal to that, we're going to call it hemp. And that means it's not going to be marijuana and then it won't be controlled as part of the Federal Controlled Substances Act. So that happens in 2018. Well, with that, people began to interpret it and said, well, if I've got this product, if I've got this seltzer water, if I've got this gummy, and it has less than 0.3 % Delta 9 THC, then it must be legal.

15:13Derek Thompson: and you know people refer to this as uh you know low thc but for example if you take a regular gummy bear might be might weigh three grams so uh you know 300 milligrams you multiply that by 0.3 percent delta 9 thc that's still going to produce you know give you up to nine milligrams of thc for a lot of people you're going to feel that and so you begin to see the proliferation of these products with Delta 9 THC. But then what they also realized is, hey, if I've got my hemp and I extract out the CBD and then I synthesize it, I can make Delta 8 THC, which is also intoxicated, Delta 10 HHC. So you've seen this proliferation of all these synthetic intoxicating cannabinoids coming from hemp.

16:02Derek Thompson: And so while you've got all these states that are legalizing cannabis kind of through their ballot initiatives or state legislatures, you then saw just a number of states where cannabis was generally prohibited. You see these intoxicating hemp products proliferating all over the place, gas stations, grocery stores, bars, you name it. Now, in December of 2025, President Trump signed a bill into law, which in theory, essentially closes this loophole and bans these hemp products starting in November of this year. Now, that said, there's a push right now either to delay or amend or get rid of this ban.

16:46Derek Thompson: And so we'll see what happens. But especially as cannabis policy researchers, this is a very fascinating time. So I want to talk about two effects of legalization, and I want to bracket this part of the discussion into these two buckets. First, I want to talk about changes on the production side, the companies that make and sell cannabis. And then I want to spend probably the bulk of our time talking about the consumer side and the effect this is having on consumers. John, let's start with the supply side. How has the cannabis product changed the most in this period of legalization. So Bo has written these wonderful papers that are all about the P's.

17:27He's a clever guy and comes up with these memorable phrases, all words begin with P. So in answer to your question, price, potency, and product variety would be the three big P's. Price per milligram of THC is dropped by 90%. Some of that is because the price per gram has gone down, And a lot of that is because the potency has gone up. There's more milligrams per gram. But besides just cheaper and more potent traditional forms, we also have this amazing explosion in the forms in which intoxicating cannabis products are being consumed. It used to, 30 years ago, essentially be a story of smoked products.

18:12and now there's vapes and dabs and edibles and tinctures. My favorite metaphor for this is it's like we used to have milk and it came in skim milk and whole milk, but it was all basically milk. And now there's a whole dairy section with cottage cheese and cheese and yogurt. And so it's just a very different product space. There are many people who might be interested in experiencing the effects of THC, but don't want to inhale hot gases. And the fact that you can take a gummy, for instance, really broadens the base of people who are willing to participate in this market.

18:51Derek Thompson: The fact that I found during my research is that in 1995, marijuana seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was about 4 % THC. Today, you can buy marijuana products with THC levels of 90 % or more. So, I mean, right there, you're talking about a 20X increase in the potential potency of this drug. But John, you're making a face to suggest that maybe I have something wrong there. It's slightly apples and oranges because the thing that was 4 % was botanical material. And the thing that is 90 % is an extract where they are withdrawing and concentrating the chemicals. But you can still make your point.

19:32I still totally agree with you. Even the botanical material is, say, 25 % THC. So 4 % to 25 % is still a massive increase. And this matters. And it matters for all sorts of drugs. Like England had been consuming ale for centuries without big problems. But then the gin epidemic of the 17th century, I think, was a big deal. The distilled spirits were more potent. And it really caused a bunch of social problems. even in a society that was used to ale. Likewise, Andean cultures have consumed coca tea made from the coca plant. No big problems. It functions like strong coffee. But once it's extracted and becomes cocaine or crack, totally different story.

20:22So concentration matters. But I do think the 90 % product is sort of a different product.

20:28Derek Thompson: No, I appreciate the edit. That's why we have the experts on here. Bo, feel free to comment on your triple P analytical schema here that John has so brilliantly summarized. And I also want to get you on the question of whether this huge increase in potency, was that something that advocates anticipated? Or has the direction of or magnitude of that increase in potency been somewhat of a surprise? Well, with respect to the piece, full disclosure, it's something I started as an offhand PowerPoint presentation 15 years ago. And I said, here are the six Ps that you need to think about if you're going to consider legalizing cannabis, because this isn't just some yes or no decision.

21:11Derek Thompson: There are multiple choices that are ultimately going to influence how this plays out for public health and public safety, social equity, government budgets. You know, and then I expanded it. I got to 14 and then I had to stop. 14 Ps. I like alliteration as much as the next guy, but I think that counts as an addiction. Yeah, my colleagues are making too much fun of me, so it's like, I got to stop. But there's one P that I think it's really important when we talk about alternatives to cannabis prohibition, and that is the profit motive. The way that this is rolled out in the United States is we've gone from prohibition, or you had these medical models, and then we've gone to straight up letting for for-profit companies not only produce and sell, but also really decide what products are going to hit the market.

22:02Derek Thompson: There are very few states that have limits, for example, on the amount of THC that could be in a product. But it turns out that between prohibition and this for-profit commercial model, there are a lot of other choices. This is work that when John and I were helping Vermont think about this over 10 years ago, We really laid out a number of these middle ground options, right? I mean, you can move away from prohibition and reduce the arrests, but not necessarily have the commercial market. You know, you can have a grow and give model. And in fact, that's what Vermont did for a while. You could limit production sales to nonprofit organizations, or you can even have government stores.

22:42Derek Thompson: You know, we still have some places where liquor is sold, you know, where it's controlled by the state government. So there are a lot, you know, and even if you're going to allow for-profit companies to get involved, you could require that they be for benefit or B Corps, right, that focus on, you know, people, planet and profit. So there are a lot of options there. And I want to make this point because once you go outside of the United States, where you're starting to see these changes in cannabis policy, they seem to be much more interested in these middle ground approaches. I mean, even in Canada, which does have a for-profit approach, in a lot of the provinces and territories, they have state stores.

23:19Derek Thompson: And there are some provinces and territories where they only have state stores, where they can kind of control the prices, control what products get sold. And also what that means is then the money goes back to the government, not necessarily to these for-profit companies. So that's a P I would highlight because it's important to put this into context that what we're seeing in the United States is very much this hyper-commercial model. In fact, even when I talk to friends that are pro-legalization over in Europe, they're like, what the hell are you guys doing in the U.S.? Why are you doing this?

23:49Derek Thompson: And part of it comes down to also issues with the commercial free speech. And the other part of this is while these states have been kind of liberalizing, this is still all illegal under federal law. Mm hmm. But for the most part, I mean, we could talk about what's been happening with these rescheduling discussions. But for all intents and purposes, the federal government has really sat on the sidelines. And there's a lot that even if the federal government's not going to legalize, there's a lot that they could be doing to guiding states, for example, helping them with testing protocols. because it's kind of the Wild West in the number of states in terms of producers choosing which labs they want to go to.

24:32Derek Thompson: So in general, you got to be pretty skeptical about those THC levels that you see on a lot of the products in stores. And Derek, you asked, did we expect potency to soar? And I would say no. But another question you asked is, did we expect legalization to take 30 years? And I think the answer there is no. Back when we were first thinking about it, we thought, will it pass? Won't it pass? Not sure. But this long, tortured, chaotic, dysfunctional, slow motion rollout that began in 96 and in 2026, as Beau says, it still isn't legal federally. That was not anticipated. And there's all sorts of dysfunction that comes from this chaotic, inconsistent regime that we're in the middle of.

25:21Derek Thompson: It is dysfunctional, but it's also dysfunctional in a way that strikes me as very prototypically American. Like what Bo is describing almost feels like, not that the Benjamin Franklin was hoping for a system quite like this, but there's like a laboratory of democracies feel to it, where like different states are experimenting with different kinds of approaches. And you combine that Laboratories of Democracy vibe with the fact that we went whole hog commercial. And what is more American than this kind of underregulated free market that has falling prices and more consumer choice and, of course, more potency if the consumers are ultimately going to demand potency?

26:01And so on the one hand, and we're going to get into consumer potential harms just a second, but just reflecting, it seems like America has legalized marijuana in the most American way.

26:14Derek Thompson: Leave a lot of it up to the states, not too much government intervention. Let the free market decide whatever we're going to do. Like it's it's both unpredictable and yet in a way kind of the most predictable outcome, given that America is America. I think that's totally right. And you can draw the analogy to gambling, too. For a long time, gambling was just banned. And then it's now embraced with constant advertising, 24-7 availability on your cell phone. We didn't find a middle ground with respect to gambling either. So let's talk about the consumer side. John, this is really where I want to make sure we slow down a bit because it's the part that I'm most interested in.

27:03Derek Thompson: You have been tracking the number of Americans who self-report daily drinking, maybe daily cigarette use, versus daily cannabis use for many years now. How has that data changed and why have the last few years represented a historic inflection point? Sure. So the punchline is high frequency use, meaning many days per month, has just soared. So alongside the utilization, we won't say caused by, but happening at the same time, yes, there was an increase in the number of people using, meaning number of people who say they've used in the last 30 days. But the big change is in days of use and in milligrams used per day of use.

27:53The fancy jargon is the big expansion has been on the intensive margin intensity, not on the extensive margin or prevalence. That's the story. And that's really been going on now for the whole 25 or 30 year era. But the thing that caught everybody's attention was just a few years ago that constantly and rapidly increasing number of people using cannabis daily or near daily crossed the more or less level line for alcohol. And that's a big shock. Back in the 1990s, if you thought about Americans and daily or near daily use of a dependence inducing antitokton, that was a conversation that was entirely about alcohol.

28:39And it is no longer the case. Now it's about equally alcohol and cannabis. And Charles Fain Lehman at the Manhattan Institute just published something, I think the last week or month, where he added the tobacco line. and daily and near daily reported cannabis use has now also crossed the line for either tobacco or cigarettes. And I don't remember it off the top of my head. It's cigarettes.

29:06Derek Thompson: A question from Charles is coming in the second half of the show, but you keep rolling. Okay. But hey, Derek, if I could add on to this, just a little bit of backstory. So John had been tracking those numbers for years. And every year when the new data would come out, he would email a handful of us cannabis nerds and say, hey, look, here's what I'm seeing. And every year we would say, John, you've got to publish this. John, you've got to publish this. And he never would. So he finally did. It comes out in one of the best journals in 2024. And not only did it attract a lot of attention, but it's also led to some important advancements.

29:44Derek Thompson: So as soon as that came out, John was just kind of looking at the total number of use days. There was another paper that came out and said, hey, if we break this down by age, you actually see that this increase in daily, near daily use of cannabis really seems to be concentrated amongst 19 to 30-year-olds. Now, that was one particular data set. And I mean, you do see it in the others, but that was what her prominent finding. But then also the new data that just came out from the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, they put out some 100-page report, but the real data are in the appendices.

30:21Derek Thompson: And if you now look at the appendices, they didn't do this before, but because of the attention that John's piece got, they now report daily and near daily use for cannabis, for alcohol, tobacco. And John kind of ran this through 2022, 2023. But what we see extending out to 2025 is this continued drop in the number of people who are using alcohol on a daily or near daily basis. I think it's now close to about 17, 18 million. And now for cannabis, it's gone up and it's closer to 21, 22 million. This episode is brought to you by Lincoln. What if your vehicle could help give you a reset? Lincoln Rejuvenate is designed to do just that.

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32:24Derek Thompson: So Eden Red Pay surveyed financial professionals to uncover exactly how AI is being used, where they're investing next, and what challenges they're working to solve. Visit edenredpay.com forward slash Spotify to explore the exclusive survey insights and see how your organization compares. John, I'd love you the same way that we talked about the most significant changes to the cannabis product in the last decade. I would love you to help me think through the most significant changes to cannabis use in the last few years. And I have three categories. They don't all begin with P, but I'm going to give them to you anyway.

33:01Derek Thompson: They are frequency, you already touched on this, frequency, age, and purpose of use. So John, how has cannabis use changed in terms of frequency, average or median age, and purpose of use? So frequency, way up, but let me spin it in a slightly different way. 30 years ago, cannabis was an occasional drug. And I use that word in both sentences of the term, occasional as opposed to daily, but also it was used on an occasion. So it would be something like, I'm going to get together with friends on the weekend and cannabis will be part of that. And it has for many people now just become part of their daily routine, which gets into your third question.

33:53I'll circle back to age in a minute. When you ask people 25 and 30 years ago, why are you using cannabis? It was focused on the intoxicating effects and sort of the pleasure, the recreation side, if you will. That's still there some, but it's almost displaced or knocked off the number one slot by a whole host of things that are more like wellness or a response to anxiety or needing to sleep. And this is a very different set of motivations. And it may also associate with the big change in age. Once upon a time, cannabis was a young person's drug. If you go back to the 1960s, it was a college campus.

34:41That is just not true. It's actually not been true for a while. But in that same paper that Beau's referring to, we produced this statistic that the median, the age of the person consuming the median gram of cannabis was 35. That is, as much cannabis was being consumed by people over age 35 as under 35. And Beau referred to this big increase in daily and near daily use, starting with 19-year-olds, but going up into middle age, depending on how you depend on middle age. And it's conspicuously not the kids. The 16-year-olds are not the ones who are using daily or near daily. So it is not the drug of youth.

35:30It is not the drug of protest against the parents' generation. It's the parents who are as likely to be using it these days. And those are all big changes.

35:38Derek Thompson: And that speaks to the fact that whereas it used to be this occasional drug, drug occasionally used for occasions, now it's a lifestyle drug for many people. It's almost akin to a vitamin or part of a wellness routine. And that rules in use among middle-aged and older Americans very cleanly. But I want to get to you in just a second. But John, looking at that chart and seeing alcohol use, especially among young people, go down, down, down, down, down. and looking at cannabis use going up. Is this one trend or two trends? One interpretation that one could layer on this is to say there's something like a law of conservation of mind-altering substances, right?

36:27Derek Thompson: Where it's like the typical American wants their mind to be altered just a certain amount decade over decade. And so if they're going to drink less gin, they're going to smoke more cannabis or eat more edibles or do whatever, more tinctures. But there's another sort of analytical gloss here that says, no, these are two different trends. That you are simultaneously seeing rising fears of the health risks of moderate drinking or reduced interest in hangovers or binge drinking. And alongside of that, you just have a totally independent and secular movement of cannabis legalization crisscrossing the country.

37:08Derek Thompson: How would you decompose this? I don't believe in the law of conservation of intoxication demand. I don't think that's right. It's a lovely phrase. And if it were right, it would have all sorts of implications. I don't think it's true. I think to a first order of approximation, these are different events or different phenomenon. And I do think that the legalization change in legal status has a lot to do with the shifts on the cannabis side. I don't know that they're all completely unrelated. For instance, part of the retrenchment pulling back from alcohol is a wellness-motivated idea. And there is, as you note, a wellness-motivated idea in cannabis.

37:51But probably one reason why I really don't believe in the law of conservation is the young kids are all right here. A lot of the alcohol use is also shifting to be less about young people. There are these generational differences and millennials are different than Gen Xers and boomers. So I do not believe in that law of conservation of intoxication, even though it's a delightful term, if it were true.

38:25Derek Thompson: And just before we get to risks, which I really want to talk about, is it in fact the case that young people are both drinking less and using drugs a little bit less than previous generations, while it's like older Gen Xers, boomers, who seem to be both drinking more and using more cannabis? Is that a fair summary or is there a better summary? Yes, pretty much. So those young people are definitely drinking less. They're definitely using less of all drugs other than cannabis. Or almost all. There's a couple other exceptions. But I think the story in cannabis is probably that the decline in price increase in availability and diversity of products is offsetting what would have been a downward trend.

39:07So young people's cannabis use is not dropping, but the fact that it's also not soaring, despite the big drop in price and the big increase in availability and so on, to me indicates that the young people are different and are less focused on intoxicants than their elders are. And it's not just intoxicants, like participation in crime, too. Young people are participating in both serious and petty crime at far lower rates than their elders did when their elders were that age.

39:42Derek Thompson: So, Bo, I want to shift from a discussion of consumer effects to a discussion about risks specifically. I mean, if all you knew, if all a person knew about cannabis use in the last 10 years was that for a handful of people, they were using it much, much more and that potency was going way up. I think that people would say, OK, well, there might be some kind of chance for risk there if there's a certain group of people that are more frequently using a stronger drug. but I don't want to put any words in your mouth here. So I wonder, what are the risks that you are most attuned to? Well, look, I mean, most people that use cannabis don't run into any problems and some people benefit, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any risks.

40:29Derek Thompson: So obviously there are concerns about impaired driving. I mean, look, driving drunk is worse than driving high, but driving high is still worse than driving sober. There's concerns, there's emerging evidence about the cardiovascular risks. And there's also real concerns about mental health, especially for youth and young adults who are consuming a lot of these higher potency products. That's the thing. The thing to keep in mind is so much of the research that's been done on the health consequences of cannabis were focused on people that were smoking lower potency stuff decades ago. I mean, most of the research, I mean, it's not focused on the products that people are actually purchasing.

41:09Derek Thompson: And so I was part of a team that did a review on this. And even when we identified the best studies, they were not strong. I mean, they did seem to suggest that those who are using more potent products were more likely to run into difficulties, may have some more mental health issues. But the evidence just is it's not a strong evidence base. But it raises this really interesting question because this is a policy choice. do you want to allow these potent products? For example, in Uruguay, when they legalized in 2013, they didn't allow these high-potency products. They don't allow the vapes. They don't allow the debt.

41:46Derek Thompson: This is a policy choice. And Quebec too. Quebec is a model in this regard also. Yeah. But even if you're not going to put a cap or if you're not going to ban these products, You can put a cap on them. For example, Vermont, I think they've got a 30 percent THC cap on flour, 60 percent on solid concentrates. Or you can think about taxing as a function of its potency, of cannabis potency. Right. I mean, nobody knows the best way to tax cannabis. But, you know, in most places, they tax cannabis as a function of the price and ad valorem tax. That's, you know, people understand that it's pretty, you know, they've seen that with sales taxes.

42:26Derek Thompson: But the thing to keep in mind is when your tax is set as a function of the price and those prices go down, so are your tax revenues. I mean, really, I mean, the cannabis tax revenues in Colorado, for example, have plummeted since 2021. Now, it could be less tourism, maybe some of the industrial hemp. But I think a big part of that is the reduction of price. Now, one of the things you could think about is if you're not going to ban the products, if you're not going to put a cap on potency, you could tax as a function of the THC level. I mean, this is what the federal government does for alcohol.

42:59Derek Thompson: And that has a couple of different advantages. One, it's not as susceptible to those price drops. But then also, if you set it up the right way, you could actually have a progressive tax with a higher tax on product with a higher potency to potentially nudge people towards lower potency products. But the thing to keep in mind with that is that works when you have a testing regime that you believe in. And as I said, it's been a long time coming. I mean, as I said, the testing industry is something that definitely people need to pay a lot of attention to this. And I remember in the early days, I think it was a state official in Colorado.

43:39Derek Thompson: And I said, well, why don't you set up a state testing lab so the state can test the tester? and find those or take the license away from those that are obviously trying to game the system. And back in those days, the response I would get is they were worried about putting their state employees at risk of violating federal law. So they said, hey, we're not going to do this. Now, over time, you know, as people realize, hey, you know, this is there's a much of an enforcement risk. You have some seen some states set up these state reference labs. But, yeah, I mean, that's important piece to think about if we're going to go and if we're going to consider these potency taxes, which, as I said, could potentially nudge people towards some of the lower potency products.

44:27Derek Thompson: John, you and I spoke on the phone the other day and we talked a little bit about the risk side of the picture. And we spoke about a couple of different risks. You said, you know, if people are smoking, then they're taking in carcinogens. That's a particular risk. People with the genetic vulnerability to psychosis might have greater likelihood of experiencing psychosis from excessive marijuana use, especially in an age of higher potency. We also talked about the fact that some people, sometimes without evidence, maybe, worry about a kind of the demotivational effects of marijuana. Like if someone's smoking every day, will they be similarly motivated for work?

45:02Derek Thompson: I myself am not particularly clear on the level of empiricism there. But what is the risk of cannabis use in an age of legalization, higher potency, higher frequency of use for a certain group of users? What risk do you think is most important or most overlooked? You know, I think this is a great question. So Bo gave a perfect summary of the well-researched and documented known risks, but it's the unknown or not yet established ones that I worry about. And you named some of them. Carcinogens is the obvious one. Unambiguously, marijuana smoke has a whole bunch of carcinogens in it, as well as tar and particulates and so on.

45:49Inhaling that is almost certainly not healthy. Why is that not more widely recognized? The answer is the epidemiological studies can't document it, but the epidemiological studies face methodological barriers. Things like most cannabis smokers also smoke tobacco. How do you know whether the lung? And also a lot of the data are based just on, did you consume marijuana at all in the last month? And we don't have the good. So the absence of not, I guess the other thing I would add is think about how long it took before the epidemiologists were able to document that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer.

46:34So for me, the fact that the epidemiology doesn't yet demonstrate that inhaling all those carcinogens is not good for you, I'm still going to worry about it. No, we could not approve any other consumer product that exposed consumers to those level of carcinogens, but somehow cannabis is could pass. So absolutely, you named one. You also named the second one, the sort of behavioral, motivational thing. Here, I'm less sure or lower probability that this will turn out to be a problem, but I think it's possible. And the risk here is almost like video game risk, sort of distracting you from all of the other things one could pursue with your life.

47:21And then the third that I think doesn't get enough attention is most of the quality control regulation on legal cannabis is adopting food based rules. We're saying, hey, we know how to control pesticides and food. We know how to control mold and food. Let's just pull those regulations over to cannabis. But it goes into a different part of your body. Food goes in your stomach, which is a bag of acid that digests almost everything that goes into it. It's like evolutionarily adapted to get junk put in it without it harming you. Your lungs are a much more vulnerable organ. The same amount of mold that your stomach could deal with easily inhaled into your lungs, that may not be as good.

48:13So there are a bunch of places where we don't know that it's a problem, but I would not be surprised if 20 years from now, for some of these other risks we say, how could we have not seen those?

48:27Derek Thompson: I want to follow up on this idea of 20 years from now, we might look back and say, how could we not have seen? The Manhattan Institute researcher Charles Fain Lehman, who you mentioned earlier, argued in an essay this past week that while marijuana is often juxtaposed with alcohol, he argues that the proper comparison might end up being tobacco. with tobacco as with marijuana a large plurality of its users seem to be daily users that rules in the possibility that some to some of them might be addicted the risks for marijuana as with tobacco might be more cumulative than acute with alcohol although there are certainly cumulative effects there.

49:10Derek Thompson: There's a higher risk of either a car accident or some other violent accident or even abuse. There are secondhand effects with smoking as with smell and cannabis. I wonder how you feel about this metaphor of seeing some of the risks of cannabis as being akin to the risks of tobacco. I totally agree with Charles. I think he's fantastic and I disagree with him. So let me do it in both parts. So like in support of him and why we can't just analogize with alcohol, think about the mechanism by which those two intoxicants impair driving. So for alcohol, the principal effect of suppressing prefrontal cortex activity, making you reckless, impulsive, overconfident.

50:06That's not the effect of cannabis. Cannabis does not make you reckless, overconfident, and impulsive. But another essential attribute to skilled driving is sustained, focused attention on something that is boring and not having your mind wander. Well, cannabis is not known for enhancing that ability to focus. So it's entirely possible for the two different drugs to both raise driving risk, but through totally different mechanisms. And so, for instance, a impairment test designed around the ways that alcohol impairs you might totally miss the impairment in cannabis. So I totally agree with Charles that we have spent too much time trying to put cannabis in the alcohol box.

50:54And there are many ways in which it is in much more similar to tobacco. The one way that I push back, I've talked with Charles about this, is I think at the end of the day, cannabis is sort of in a box by itself. I think we're way better off thinking about cannabis in comparison to tobacco as well as alcohol, but also there are ways in which it is by itself. So this concern that I have about it just not being a performance enhancer in a symbol processing intellectual era doesn't have a metaphor in either of them. But something like 50 % of cannabis is consumed by people who spend at least 50 % of their waking hours under the influence.

51:39And we don't know at this point whether or not it is holding them back from achieving life goals. Um, if it did, that would be different than alcohol, which clearly holds you back while you're using it, but you tend to use it only in weekends, but also different than tobacco. Because if anything, nicotine is a performance enhancer. Um, so sometimes I think cannabis just is in its own bin. And one of the reasons we struggle so much with it is it has its own weird pattern of, of risks and benefits.

52:17Derek Thompson: Bo, as you and I have discussed, I'm very interested in this phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the decline of socializing, the rise of social isolation. And to set up this question, I actually want to pull in some research by John's colleague at Carnegie Mellon, Casey Craswell, who I was emailing with over the last few days. Unfortunately, could not make a cameo appearance in this podcast, as I hoped. She's done some really interesting research on alcohol and socialization that I want to summarize before I kick off this question to you. As I said, am I open for people who are listening?

52:50Derek Thompson: Casey's research has shown that alcohol seems to increase what she calls positive emotional expression. It increases smiling. It makes conversation between two, three, seven people feel easier. And according to Craswell, cannabis is much more likely to be used alone than alcohol. Almost 60 % of past-year cannabis users report using alone versus 32 % of drinkers. And this was part of her email that interested me the most as we were emailing back and forth earlier this week. So I'm quoting from Casey Crasswell here. Quote, alcohol appears to actively manufacture social reward, changing what happens between people in the moment.

53:34Derek Thompson: Cannabis is often used in company, but we have very little evidence it amplifies bonding in the same way, and it's considerably more likely to be used alone. That distinction matters for public health because solitary use of either substance is one of our more reliable early markers of risk. End quote. Beau, I would just like your reaction to this. Because frankly, I came into this episode with a little sparkle of an hypothesis that every age of America gets the drug it deserves. And an age of rising socialization might be more likely to be an age of cocktail parties and cigarette smoking. And an age of social isolation might be ever so more likely to develop more of a cannabis habit.

54:24Derek Thompson: Maybe you see things in a more nuanced way, but I wonder your reaction to both my hypothesis here and Kraswell's research. Yeah, I mean, I think this gets to what you were talking about before, Derek, in terms of why has alcohol use decreased? I mean, we talked about there's, you know, much more discussion about the health risks. And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, you did a piece, what was a year ago, in the substack about the adult time news survey. And what did it find? Between 2003 and 2024, the share of time that Americans spent either hosting or going to social gatherings or parties dropped 50%.

55:02Derek Thompson: 70 % for Americans under 25. Yeah. Right? And so you can imagine that, especially for people going to parties where alcohol is more available and also using it as a social lubricant, as John's colleague was arguing for. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. But I think there's some other reasons why alcohol use could be going down that we need to be thinking about. And part of it has just been this huge reduction in the use amongst youth, which could then translate to less people using as adults. And so, you know, the University of Michigan has a survey called Monitoring the Future. And so they've been asking high school seniors for 50 years about their substance use patterns.

55:42Derek Thompson: And just to put this in perspective, in the late 1970s, if you asked a high school senior, hey, did you have a drink in the past year? Oh, over 80 % of them would say, yes, I had a drink in the past year. Go to 2025, it's closer to 40%. So about a 50 % drop. Now, if you say, hey, did you have a drink in the past month? You know, back in the late 70s, it was at 66%, 68%. Today, that's dropped to 22%. So more than a two-thirds drop. And if you ask those high school seniors in the late 70s, hey, do you drink every day? Now, back in those days, it was about 6%, 7 % that said they drink every day. Today, it's now 1%.

56:25Derek Thompson: So, I mean, you're just seeing this large reduction, which could translate to people, you know, not using as much as adults. Also, I mean, in more recent years, we just also have more non-alcoholic options. I mean, you see them in bars and stores. And also, some of the stuff just tastes better. I like to consume an IPA every once in a while. And I got to say, the non-alcoholic IPAs are so much better now. Athletic IPAs are genuinely wonderful. Yeah. It's a great beverage. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there's something there definitely within the past five, six years. But the other reason or the other hypothesis, and this is much more speculative, has to do with GLP-1s.

57:10Hmm.

57:11Derek Thompson: And so there is a there is there is anecdotal evidence when they were doing some of these clinical trials with people to see for reduced diabetes or obesity. They're finding, oh, wait, it might be reducing alcohol use. And so what was it in 2024? The Lancet published a systematic review of kind of what do we know about GLP ones and alcohol use? And they came out and said, hey, look, the evidence isn't strong. It's focused on subgroups. Some of it's observational. But look, it looks like there could be something there in terms of GLP-1s is reducing alcohol use. Since then, there's been a lot of research focused on this.

57:48Derek Thompson: And even a couple months ago in The Lancet, they published a randomized control trial with people who had alcohol use disorder and obesity and found that those that were placebo, some people got GLP-1s, others got the placebo, finding that those got the GLP-1s were less likely to be using alcohol. And I know there's a lot more work being done on this. This is very emerging, but it would be fascinating. And I'm sure there's got to be some researcher out there looking at this now, especially looking over the past 10 years, how much of this decrease in alcohol use could be attributable to the use of GLP-1s.

58:22Derek Thompson: Now, you might argue, well, wouldn't GLP-1 use reduce cannabis use as well? Maybe, but I haven't seen as much research on that. Most of the research so far is focused on alcohol. But that's speculation. It could theoretically go the other way around. I mean, some people say that when they take GLP-1s, they have stomach distress and they feel nauseous. And what is one benefit of cannabis use? Sometimes it reduces feelings of nausea, you know, originally for people going through cancer therapies, but, you know, maybe not for people on GLP-1. So, John, one more question here before we do some forward-looking questions about policy to wrap things up.

58:57Derek Thompson: This is, again, extremely speculative, but filed under this general hypothesis that every age of America gets the drug it deserves. When I think about some of the reading that I've done on cannabis and the way that I use it in my own life, there's a lot of studies suggesting that people who use cannabis tend to use it around other people who use cannabis. That there's sort of a self-selection of cannabis users who get together and smoke in a way that is unlike a party where sometimes there'll be beer served alongside sparkling water, alongside, you know, non-alcoholic beer, where you have this more, this mixing of drugs, so to speak.

59:35Derek Thompson: And I was thinking, you know, it's almost as if cannabis could be described as a drug of selection. Not only is it people using cannabis selecting to be around each other, but when I smoke, it is almost exclusively to watch a movie with beautiful art direction alone. Which is to say I am selecting the movie and then selecting the drug to produce a very specific effect on the movie that I'm watching. And if cannabis is a drug of selection, I feel like alcohol is a little bit more likely to be a drug of socialization. I'm gonna go to a party, I don't know who's there. I wanna sort of increase my own courage to talk to strangers and maybe just lubricate my social experiences so I'll have that beer, I'll have that cocktail.

1:00:23Derek Thompson: And I wonder what you make of this potentially completely unempirical theory, that there is a meaningful distinction between a drug of selection and a drug of socialization. maybe particularly in a world where it is easier now in the 2020s than in previous decades to literally select, to have a fine-grained ability to select everything around us, whether it's on our phones or our meals, our entertainment. Maybe there is something fitting for a drug of selection for an era of consumer selection. I'm so glad you began this by saying we're speculating here. I don't know. It is also possible that you are a little bit more analytical and introspective on this than the modal user of either substance.

1:01:14But I'll jump in because it's a fun thought. I mean, the one side that I don't think is just speculation is alcohol is a drug of socialization. And I do think that's what Dr. Haswell's work literally shows. Steroids are performance enhancing for high jumpers, and alcohol is in some sense performance enhancing for socializing. To me, the provocative idea is the one that you're putting out there about cannabis as a drug of selection. Two thoughts for whatever it's worth in this. One is there is still perhaps some legacy or inertia from the fact that it once was illegal. And you do tend to only want to reveal your illegal behavior to other people who are doing that same illegal behavior.

1:02:03The second is cannabis is a consumer good. So are cornflakes. But cannabis is a consumer good around which many people build a portion of their identity. If somebody has cornflakes for breakfast in the morning, they don't walk around all day thinking, I'm a cornflakes eater. But there are certain consumer goods and consumer activities that we do end up making part of our identity. For me, for instance, I kayak, and kayaking is part of my identity. For a fair number of cannabis users, it is part of how they think about who they are. And maybe that contributes to the phenomenon you're describing of sort of a homophily of cannabis users selecting to use with other cannabis users.

1:02:55But I'm just going to repeat, I'm so glad that you gave us the chance to speculate. I don't know. It's fun to think about.

1:03:04Derek Thompson: Bo, you were talking earlier about how America has legalized cannabis in a very specific way. I called it a very American way, but it's certainly very specific where you have a national law against a drug that is being legalized on a state-by-state basis that nonetheless has a national carve-out. And there's a commercial free market war over getting that next marginal consumer to buy their good. And therefore, it looks like a cake over here and a brownie over here and a candy over here. It's a very American legalization process. But there's a lot of other countries that are experimenting with this.

1:03:38Derek Thompson: And I wonder, to give us a sense of how it might otherwise be, what's a country that you think is doing a good, thoughtful, responsible job, both legalizing this, making this drug legal so we don't have what we had in the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of arrests of consumers and sellers of this drug, but also shaving off some of the excesses that you and me and John have talked about in the last hour? Well, you know, earlier I mentioned the bottle in Uruguay. It's fascinating. I don't know it. I don't think you could just apply it here in the U.S., but there may be elements of it that you could apply.

1:04:18Derek Thompson: So when they legalized in 2013, they said, OK, if you're 18 and older, you can get access to, you know, to a legal supply of cannabis. However, you've got to register with the government and you have to choose between one of three mechanisms. You can either grow it at home, you could join a cannabis collective, or you could purchase it from a pharmacy. And so you had to pick one of those. And it took a while for the pharmacies to get up and running. And still, it's only in a minority of them there. But it gave people this option, especially these cannabis clubs. And it's really interesting. This is the model that you're starting to see proliferate more in Europe.

1:05:02Derek Thompson: So, I mean, Spain had had these, but they weren't necessarily legal. So these are kind of collectives. They're not supposed to be commercial. They're just producing for the members. And so I believe Malta is now in the process of starting to kind of license some of these collectives, but also Germany. So it's one thing to talk about Malta and Uruguay, but we talk about Germany. And so Germany has just started rolling this out. It's going to be fascinating to see how it plays out. But the argument is, is here's a way that people can get access to cannabis, maybe know how it's grown, but you don't necessarily have the for-profit mechanism kind of driving advertising and promotion.

1:05:47Derek Thompson: And so I definitely think paying attention to what happens in Germany, and we'll see how long it lasts before someone comes in and pushes it to go commercial. I think there's pressure for that. But paying attention to these collective models, I think, could be quite informative. But as we talked about before, I think the other model, especially for those U.S. states that haven't legalized, the other model to look at is one that's already been adopted in a number of states with respect to alcohol. It's the state store model. And obviously, because with a state store model, it can control advertising.

1:06:20Derek Thompson: It can control the prices, control the products. The revenues go to the state. But this is especially important when you hear people talking about social equity. That's one thing that's really evolved over the past 15 years. I mean, the early days when people would talk about social racial equity, they would pretty much talk about reducing the risk of arrest and disparities in arrest, which makes a lot of sense. But over time, states started allowing expungement and shifting the onus to the state. There were discussions about using tax revenues to help groups that were disproportionately affected by cannabis prohibition.

1:06:53Derek Thompson: Even got at least one city in Illinois that's using their tax revenues for slavery reparations. But then also there are these conversations about license preferences. Let's give license preferences to individuals that were disproportionately affected by cannabis prohibition. And in a lot of places, they're designing these programs to focus on black and brown individuals. But legally, they can't do that. So then they'll focus on arrests for concentrated. They'll do different things. And the thing is, is with a government store model, all that revenue goes back to the government. And then you could use that.

1:07:33Derek Thompson: And if the goal is to improve economic well-being for certain groups, you can then take that revenue and then apply that to those programs. Because the thing you have to keep in mind with these license preferences that you see in a number of states is we've already talked about how prices are going down. It's hard for small businesses to compete. So the last thing you want to do is set up a group of individuals that you're hoping to help in terms of economic well-being, set them up in a system where they may not make much money and there's a good chance they could lose money, especially in the context of where we are with federal prohibition.

1:08:09Derek Thompson: John talked about these price declines not only prices but price per unit THC that's with federal prohibition you legalize at the federal level and it's no longer illegal to move cannabis across state lines you can see the industry concentrate very quickly John estimated about 10 years ago so maybe a little different now you can produce all the Delta 9 THC that's consumed in the United States on a few dozen industrial sized farms that's it so if you think prices are declining now You just wait. So as I said, that's really important for states that are thinking about these equity programs and these licensed property programs.

1:08:46Derek Thompson: You've got to be really thoughtful about this. And if your goal really is to take cannabis revenues and to make sure they're going into programs to help people that were disproportionately affected by cannabis prohibition, the state's door model is what you're going to want to look into. John, last question to you. What's a country that's doing this right? Quebec. I mean, Canada overall, but Quebec in particular. Here's an image. We can legalize what the illegal market has been supplying without adding a whole bunch of products in consumption that didn't exist before. In a nutshell, you can think about Quebec as going that route.

1:09:24They try to provide legal competition to the historical product that the illegal market was supplying without encouraging the great expansion of use of all of these different and higher potency products. So I'd say Quebec.

1:09:41Derek Thompson: John Calkins, Bill Kilmer, thank you very, very much. Thank you. This was fun. Thanks for having us.