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Americans Just Said No to Drugs
A lobby card for The Devil’s Weed movie, 1949. (LMPC via Getty Images)

Americans Just Said No to Drugs

Why legalization lost at the ballot box.

Kamala Harris’s decisive loss may have grabbed the headlines, but there was another big loser in this election: drugs.

In Florida, voters failed to approve a constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational marijuana, defying both expectations and the endorsement of president-elect Donald Trump. Voters in South and North Dakota defeated legal weed initiatives, too, by decisive margins—the second and third time for each state, respectively. Bright-blue Massachusetts had the chance to become the third state, after Oregon and Colorado, to legalize psychedelic drugs. Polls suggested Question 4 was too close to call, but Bay Staters ended up rejecting it by a 14-point margin. Even Cambridge and Boston could barely post majorities. 

These votes came from the grassroots, defeating big-money campaigns for legalization. The pro-legalization camp in Florida, backed by the massive cannabis company Trulieve, spent nearly $150 million, more than any prior recreational marijuana campaign. The Yes on 4 campaign in Massachusetts spent just $7 million, but that was still 73 times more than the opposition.

Although Tuesday was not the first time legalization initiatives have fallen short and, in fact, Nebraska decided to approve medical marijuana, the decisiveness of voters’ rejections augurs a change. 

“It shows how drugs are not the winning issue many politicians have been tricked into believing,” Kevin Sabet, president of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said. “As marijuana has become legalized, commercialized, and normalized, its effects are now so ubiquitous they are hard to miss.” 

Indeed, Americans might finally be noticing that more permissive drug policy does not just mean that people can partake of a joint without the police hassling them. It also creates big social problems: car crashes (accounting for an estimated 1,400 fatalities per year), public disorder (a 35 percent increase in chronic homelessness in states that legalize), and surging insanity (a 70 percent increase in psychosis among teens that use). Even drugs like pot and psychedelics can make people less responsible, harder to employ, and more dysfunctional.  

For the past decade, marijuana legalization has seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut. Since 2012, 24 states have legalized—14 in the past four years alone. Voters have been willing to permit others’ vices. But increasingly, they’re seeing that those vices have consequences for them, too.

Take a step back. In the early 2010s, marijuana prohibition was seen as intolerably harsh and racially discriminatory, while pot was presented as basically harmless—even, as Boston University professor Jay Wexler put it, worthy of “exuberance.” 

Psychedelics, too, were initially sold as harmless. They were presented as natural plant medicines with miracle healing properties. And recent clinical research indeed supports the idea that they can help conditions from post-traumatic stress disorder to major depression. That research helped buoy the legalization movement for drugs like psilocybin and ayahuasca, which looked like they might be the next marijuana.

Central to the argument of legalizers was that use of so-called “soft” drugs—pot and psychedelics, not fentanyl and meth—is a victimless crime. Legalization would mostly permit private behavior, respecting people’s right to do what they want with their bodies. You’d expect a generally pro-autonomy electorate—which, for example, voted for both Trump and abortion—to still buy this argument.

What changed? We can now see what happens when a state says yes to drugs.

Today, voters can look at California, which is blanketed in unlicensed shops. They can talk to friends in New York City, who complain constantly of the smell of weed. They can learn about Colorado, where 15 percent of marijuana users report driving after using.

Those impressions are backed by a growing body of research. Marijuana legalization has been shown to cause homelessness and addiction, as the availability of a harmful substance attracts and increases dysfunctional behavior. It causes more fatal accidents, as intoxicated drivers choose to get behind the wheel. It may even lower property values, as the proliferation of legal pot shops makes neighborhoods less attractive places to live or work. 

And there’s the effects on kids. While legalization doesn’t seem to make kids more likely to use pot in the first place, it does hurt those who do use it. Research shows that legalization increases frequent use, addiction, and hospitalization among minors, yielding both acute harms like frequent, intense vomiting and long-term risks of psychosis and schizophrenia.  

Psychedelics, too, have potentially widespread social consequences. The research showing their efficacy also revealed major side effects, including risks for psychosis and suicidality. That’s part of why the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society opposed passage of Question 4. 

Public incidents of recreational psychedelic harm have started to pile up, like the Alaska Airlines pilot who attempted to shut off his plane’s engines midair several days after a magic mushroom trip, or the death of Matthew Perry, killed by the recently legalized hallucinogen ketamine. Under state legalization, psychedelics aren’t a carefully controlled medicine administered by professionals in clinics—they’re just another drug.

Proponents of drug policy liberalization have traded on the idea that voting for legalization just means leaving users alone. That turned out to be false: Even soft drug legalization, it turns out, has had profound social consequences. And voters are starting to realize this.

Can liberalizers win in spite of this? Maybe. It’s still hard to defend the worst excesses of the War on Drugs, like hyper-aggressive policing of poor, black communities or the stigmatization of addicts. Advocates of prohibition will need to articulate a smarter, humane approach to minimizing the dangers of both drugs and drug enforcement. But the playing field is no longer so lopsided, and liberalizers’ arguments just got a lot harder to make.

Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

For more coverage of the 2024 election, click here.

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