The Biden Administration wants to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug – on par with anabolic steroids and Tylenol with Codeine. The reason they want to do this is quite transparent – they want to buy the votes of young people in the next election. But is this good for these young people and the country?

When I went to college in the 1970s, marijuana was part of the counterculture. “Hippies” and other radicals of that day smoked “weed” in order to get high and generally to resist conformation to the norms of society. It was the era of the Vietnam War and young people were generally opposed to anything the government was doing. Little was known about the side effects of smoking marijuana but it was generally thought to be no worse than drinking alcohol; maybe even better.

Fifty years later the cannabis culture has gone from counterculture to mainstream. Allysia Finley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, tells us a 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans age 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days – more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes. That’s a radical change in the culture and in the perceived health threat of marijuana versus cigarettes.

While marijuana use remains a federal crime, 24 states have legalized it and another 14 permit it for medical purposes. Last month media outlets reported the Biden administration move to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug, but experts on marijuana and its health hazards are alarmed.

Bertha Madras thinks this would be a colossal mistake. Ms. Madras, 81, is a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost experts on marijuana. “It’s a political decision, not a scientific one,” she says. “And it’s a tragic one.” In 2024, that is a countercultural view.

Ms. Madras has spent 60 years studying drugs, starting with LSD when she was a graduate student at Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, an affiliate of Montreal’s McGill University, in the 1960s. “I was interested in psychoactive drugs because I thought they could not only give us some insight into how the brain works, but also on how the brain undergoes dysfunction and disease states,” she says.

In 2015 the World Health Organization asked her to do a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses. The 41-page report documented scant evidence of marijuana’s medicinal benefits and reams of research on its harms, from cognitive impairment and psychosis to car accidents. She continued to study marijuana, including at the addiction neurobiology lab she directs at Mass General Brigham McLean Hospital. In a phone interview this week, she walked me through the scientific literature on marijuana, which runs counter to much of what Americans hear in the media.

For starters, she says, the “addiction potential of marijuana is as high or higher than some other drug,” especially for young people. About 30% of those who use cannabis have some degree of a use disorder. By comparison, only 13.5% of drinkers are estimated to be dependent on alcohol. Sure, alcohol can also cause harm if consumed in excess. But Ms. Madras sees several other distinctions.

One or two drinks will cause only mild inebriation, while “most people who use marijuana are using it to become intoxicated and to get high.” Academic outcomes and college completion rates for young people are much worse for those who use marijuana than for those who drink, though there’s a caveat: “It’s still a chicken and egg whether or not these kids are more susceptible to the effects of marijuana or they’re using marijuana for self-medication or what have you.”

Marijuana and alcohol both interfere with driving, but with the former there are no medical “cutoff points” to determine whether it’s safe to get behind the wheel. As a result, prohibitions against driving under the influence are less likely to be enforced for people who are high. States where marijuana is legal have seen increases in car accidents.

One of the biggest differences between the two substances is how the body metabolizes them. A drink will clear your system within a couple of hours. “You may wake up after binge drinking in the morning with a headache, but the alcohol is gone.” By contrast, “marijuana just sits there and sits there and promotes brain adaptation.”

That’s worse than it sounds. “We always think of the brain as gray matter,” Ms. Madras says. “But the brain uses fat to insulate its electrical activity, so it has a massive amount of fat called white matter, which is fatty. And that’s where marijuana gets soaked up. . . . My lab showed unequivocally that blood levels and brain levels don’t correspond at all—that brain levels are much higher than blood levels. They’re two to three times higher, and they persist once blood levels go way down.” Even if people quit using pot, “it can persist in their brain for a while.”

Thus marijuana does more lasting damage to the brain than alcohol, especially at the high potencies being consumed today. Levels of THC—the main psychoactive ingredient in pot—are four or more times as high as they were 30 years ago. That heightens the risks, which range from anxiety and depression to impaired memory and cannabis hyperemesis syndrome—cycles of severe vomiting caused by long-term use.

There’s mounting evidence that cannabis can cause schizophrenia. A large-scale study last year that examined health histories of some 6.9 million Danes between 1972 and 2021 estimated that up to 30% of young men’s schizophrenia diagnoses could have been prevented had they not become dependent on pot. Marijuana is worse in this regard than many drugs usually perceived as more dangerous. “Users of other potent recreational drugs develop chronic psychosis at much lower rates,” Ms. Madras says. When healthy volunteers in research experiments are given THC—as has been done in 15 studies—they develop transient symptoms of psychosis. “And if you treat them with an antipsychotic drug such as haloperidol, those symptoms will go away.”

(Note: More on this subject in Part II)

If you’ve been to the doctor lately, you know our healthcare system is in decline. Although the profession of medicine can do things today we couldn’t imagine fifty years ago, the practice of delivering these advances in medical treatment is declining.

Many of the changes we are experiencing today in doctors’ offices are the result of shifts in who is employing your doctor. When I went into practice in 1984, most doctors were self-employed, or at least worked for other doctors. Today about 70% of all physicians are employed by hospitals, large healthcare systems, or the government. In other words, they don’t get to decide on their own what’s best for their patients.

This change is not happening by chance. It’s all part of the government’s plan to someday control the delivery of all healthcare. The more doctors are employed by hospitals, large healthcare systems, and the government, the more the government can determine what they can and can’t do and therefore what they spend and don’t spend on healthcare. The ultimate control of all healthcare expenditures is the goal – and that’s called socialized medicine.

Grace-Marie Turner, writing for Galen.org, tells us other ways the progressive government of the Biden Administration is moving in this direction. She says, “The Biden administration is continuing the march toward a universal, government-run health care system, both by chipping away at the private health sector and ushering more and more people into government programs. The latest: President Biden announced on Tuesday he’s giving legal status to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens and their children. At least 500,000 are expected to qualify.

It’s hard to understand how this is legal since there will be significant costs associated with their new eligibility for entitlement programs, including ACA and Medicaid coverage—spending that should require congressional approval. Lawsuits will ensue. This follows the controversial “Dreamers” program the Obama administration created in 2012 that gave legal status—and entitlement eligibility—to adults who were brought into the U.S. illegally as children.”

She says The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to award $500 million in grants over the next five years to “navigator” programs across the country. A creation of Obamacare, navigators are paid by government to assist consumers in signing up for health coverage.  The problem: We already have a network of nearly a million private insurance agents that have decades of knowledge and experience in helping clients find the best health coverage for their needs and pocketbooks. It’s very hard for them to compete with much-less-experienced navigators backed by $500 million in taxpayer dollars.

She also tells us the Biden administration is undermining the competitive, consumer-friendly model of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit.  It is making changes to Part D that are degrading the program, leading to fewer plan choices, fewer drugs covered, and premiums which are expected to increase by more than 20% next year.

And they are attacking Medicare Advantage plans in ways designed to discourage seniors from enrolling in these private, competing health plans that more than 30 million seniors have voluntarily chosen for lower costs and better benefits.  But the number of options is shrinking as plans exit the program, citing Biden administration regulatory demands and financial pressures.

The result of these changes will be: Fewer choices.  Higher costs.  More government control. More government spending. 

For more on how the government is expanding its control of the American healthcare system, read my recent blog The ObamaCare Subsidy Fraud.

Condoleezza Rice has called School Choice “the civil rights issue of our times.” The former Secretary of State, who is now head of Stanford University’s renowned Hoover Institution, explained recently what she means at an event held at The Reagan Presidential Library.

Jason Riley, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, tells us Ms. Rice spoke pointedly about the importance of school choice for low-income families. “We already have a choice system in education,” she said. “If you are of means, you will move to a district where the schools are good and the houses are expensive, like Palo Alto, Calif.” If you can afford it, she added, “you will send your kids to private school. So, who’s stuck in failing neighborhood schools? Poor kids. A lot of them minority kids.”

Ms. Rice expressed little patience for elites who criticize school choice for others while exercising it for their own kin. “How can you say you’re for civil rights—how can you say you’re for the poor—when you’re condemning those children to not being able to read?” she said. “If you want to say that school choice and vouchers and charter schools are destroying the public schools, fine. You write that editorial in the Washington Post. But then, don’t send your kids to Sidwell Friends,” the private school in Washington where tuition tops $55,000.

The good news is that school-reform advocates have made significant gains in recent years even though the current administration has been more hostile than its Democratic predecessors to educational choice. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama supported charters, as do large majorities of low-income minorities, but Joe Biden has disparaged school choice and has made it more difficult for charter operators to secure federal funding. The reason is Biden is beholden to the teachers unions because his wife Jill is a member!

But states are making progress. In 2023 Arkansas, Florida, Iowa and Ohio created or expanded programs that give underprivileged families more education options. Earlier this year, Alabama’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed the Choose Act, which creates education savings accounts that can be used for public schools, private schools, online schools or home schooling. And in Texas, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott overcame opposition from the teachers unions (and some antichoice Republicans) to secure a legislative majority in November that will allow the state to pass an ESA bill that failed last year.

Nevertheless, school-choice evangelists suffered a defeat last week in Oklahoma, where the state Supreme Court blocked plans to establish the country’s first religious charter school. Last year, an Oklahoma school board voted to approve a Catholic Archdiocese application to create the taxpayer-funded St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. State Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, sued to stop the school from opening, alleging that a contract between the state and a religious institution violated state and federal law.

In a 6-2 ruling, the court said Oklahoma’s constitution requires public schools, including charter schools, to be nonsectarian. The court also said that the contract violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the state from using public money to support a religious institution. A lawyer for St. Isidore told the Journal that an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is in the works, and let’s hope so.

It’s hard to imagine anyone opposing school choice initiatives unless they are beholden to the teachers unions. School choice is the means to a productive future that should be available to all children, regardless of their economic status. If you oppose that, you are exposing your political bias and demonstrating you care more about the teachers union agenda than you do about the future of America’s children.

Just as civil rights became the issue of the 1960s, school choice has become the issue of the 21st century. It’s time everyone got on board this train.