Michael Crow

AZ I See It

In 1932, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brandeis described the dynamic role that a “courageous” state and its citizens can play “to try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

This insight, that a state can be a “laboratory” of democracy, has become a popular tool to explain and justify occasional risk-taking by legislators and citizens.

Since 2012 we’ve seen a handful of states legalize recreational use of marijuana. This November Arizona voters could add the Grand Canyon State to the ranks of Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Alaska if the ballot measure legalizing the drug passes.

While Arizona is one of 25 states that passed medical marijuana laws for limited use, it’s worth pausing to ask whether our state, and particularly our young people, would really benefit from expanding its availability.

Marijuana's appeal is growing

Clearly, people from every age group have grasped the correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer: Cigarette smoking has declined by more than 50 percent over the last two decades.

Meanwhile, according to a 2015 national “Monitoring the Future” survey, the rate of “daily or near-daily” marijuana use among young adults is on the rise, reaching its highest level since 1980, when the drug was only about one-fourth as potent as it is today.

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For that age group, marijuana smoking now surpasses cigarettes.

A recent Pew Research poll underscored the softening of attitudes, with a majority of Americans (54 percent) in support of legalization. They are four times more likely to say that alcohol is more harmful to a person’s health than marijuana – 69 percent versus 15 percent.

My concern is not limited to how the referendum could affect my university’s campus. In fact, federal law will still prohibit marijuana on all three state university campuses.

What does that mean for society?

Yet as an educator, I am deeply concerned about both the short-term and long-term harm that increased marijuana use may have on the development of our young people and ultimately on society. This represents a challenge for leaders in education from middle school on up. We have a responsibility to ensure that young people are aware of the risks.

As a 2014 New England Journal of Medicine article notes, from childhood and adolescence to about the age of 21, the brain is “intrinsically more vulnerable than a mature brain to the adverse long-term effects of environmental insults, such as exposure to tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the primary active ingredient in marijuana.”

As explained by the four authors, including Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, smoking marijuana can impair “neural connectivity” in specific brain regions.

The adverse effects of both short-term and long-term use are reason for alarm: It can impair short-term memory and functions that require alertness and awareness, making it hard to learn and retain information. It can undermine motor coordination, affecting the ability to drive and increasing the risk of accidents and injuries.

The problems with long-term use

Long-term use not only may alter brain development among adolescents, heavy use of marijuana – and, to a lesser extent, alcohol and nicotine – dramatically increases the likelihood of abusing drugs such as cocaine because “they prime the brain for a heightened response to other drugs.”

While these authors and other researchers acknowledge the difficulty of making clear causal links between regular marijuana use and the risks of anxiety, depression and even psychosis in some cases, the effect on cognitive function while intoxicated and for a significant period of days afterward can lead to failure to learn.

This increased incapacity to manage challenging school work explains the association between regular marijuana use by adolescents and poor grades. The journal’s authors offer a damning summary of long-term risks: “Heavy marijuana use has been linked to lower income, greater need for socioeconomic assistance, unemployment, criminal behavior, and lower satisfaction with life.”

These more extreme consequences may only impact a small percentage of users, but at a time when a growing number of states are allowing this drug to become more socially acceptable through legalization, we can reasonably anticipate that the numbers of people involved in heavy use and addictive behaviors will grow.

Small danger, but is it worth the risk?

The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that about 9 percent of those who experiment with marijuana become addicted. A National Institute on Drug Abuse survey found that 3 percent of 10th graders and 6 percent of 12th graders use marijuana or hashish on a daily basis.

Arizonans and citizens in other states that are considering making this drug more available should contemplate whether the dangers that some of our most vulnerable family members and neighbors will face is worth the risk.

At a time when our state’s success depends on adding to our population of able, educated citizens and making use of all the brain power that we can muster, I think the answer is no. This lab experiment would be a step backward, not forward.

Dr. Michael M. Crow is the president of Arizona State University. The views expressed here reflect his personal opinion. Email him at president@asu.edu; follow on Twitter, @michaelcrow.