The Commonwealth of Massachusetts just sent a delegation to Colorado to study the effects of cannabis legalization there, and unlike the pinko commies at the Brookings Institution, the good folks at the Bay State Senate see only bad, bad, bad. Their new report, which claims not to take any position on the pending vote on the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, nonetheless conscientiously warns of catastrophic consequences for Massachusetts if the state’s pesky voters forget what’s good for them and decide they want to try something besides a miserably failed policy of prohibition.

But while the solons of Boston may know everything about telling people what to do, they don’t know much about marijuana. Here’s everything the Report of the Special Senate Committee on Marijuana gets wrong about legalization:

Health Impacts of Marijuana Use: the report warns that “recreational marijuana use can cause short-term impacts that may include increased heart rate and blood pressure, delayed reaction time, reduced motor control, and impaired decision making.” That’s true enough, if a bit alarmist. But then it goes on to say that “longer-term impacts of adult marijuana use are less well understood.”

Wrong. What they actually meant to say is that marijuana is one of the most thoroughly studied drugs on the planet, but evidence for long-term harms stemming from adult use is remarkably scant. While absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, one federal judge who studied the health effects of cannabis for over two years concluded that it “was one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” That statement was made over 25 years ago, and no evidence has since come to light to refute it. What the Massachusetts senators really mean is that they don’t understand the evidence, since it doesn’t line up with what they want to believe.

Its Supposed Addictive Potential: “Approximately 1 in 9 users become dependent on marijuana and require treatment to overcome this addiction,” says the report, no fewer than three times. Yet nowhere does it cite any sources for arriving at this figure, and indeed a cursory glance shows that the study authors failed to perform even a simple fact check for this claim. It’s apparently a reference to a figure commonly cited by the National Institutes on Drug Abuse (NIDA), but the report can’t even get that right: according to NIDA, the “addiction” rate for cannabis is not “1 in 9” but rather 9%, which is actually 1 in 11. Well, maybe that’s not such a massive difference, but even the 1 in 11 figure is heavily inflated by an over-reliance on data which is over twenty years old and collected with flawed methodology. The truth is that some people do get dependent on cannabis, but the number of people who do so has been greatly exaggerated.

Impacts of Youth Use: “Youth marijuana users,” the report confidently declares, “may suffer long-term developmental impacts, including reduced IQ, memory, and learning functions.” This statement is apparently a reference to NIDA-funded research conducted by Meier et al claiming to show a drop of IQ among adolescent marijuana users between ages 13 and 38 relative to the general population. That sounds really scary, but fortunately it’s not true. Six months after the original study was published, the same journal published a critical review of the NIDA-funded data which revealed the IQ disparity could be easily accounted for by other factors. “Although it would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited,” the critical study concluded, “the methodology is flawed and the causal inference drawn from the results premature.” The evidence against a supposed drop in IQ among teen cannabis users was further eroded by a pair of twins studies published earlier this year; neither study could find any solid link. It’s not clear what “developmental impacts” may be referred to, though it’s possible the authors may be referring to evidence of smaller amygdalas and other physically measurable changes in brain structure; but while such data certainly call for caution, it is important to remember that the actual developmental impacts of such changes remain unknown.

Government Can’t Be Lazy Anymore: The report also claims that “legalization of marijuana creates some different public safety concerns. State health officials have to assume responsibility for ensuring that products do not contain unsafe levels of pesticides, mold and other contaminants. Businesses and law enforcement have to deal with security issues, including theft of product and the industry’s high use of cash [pun apparently unintended].” These statements are more or less true, but characterizing quality assurance and security issues as “different public safety concerns” is spurious, because in fact they’re the same concerns present today; the only difference is that, under prohibition, the state has affirmatively chosen not to take responsibility for these issues. There’s something disturbing about a report authored by elected representatives attempting to characterize their job of carrying out the will of voters as, well, a problem.

Kids Aren’t Getting the Wrong Message: The report acknowledges that minors in Massachusetts find marijuana to be very easy to obtain, although nowhere does it take the mental leap of acknowledging that this fact presents strong evidence for the miserable failure of current prohibition policies. But the report does claim that “in recent years, teen perception of marijuana’s riskiness has substantially declined,” which the authors call “a particularly worrisome trend.” That claim is based on the results of the national Monitoring the Future survey, which asks US teens about drug use availability and attitudes every year and is generally accepted as good data. But what they forget to mention is that within the same time frame and according to the same survey data, adolescent disapproval of marijuana use has significantly increased. The paradox of how teens can find cannabis to be so easy to obtain, are less likely to believe it’s a dangerous drug, and yet also have even stronger views against its use appears to be too mind-boggling for these senators to understand; yet actually, it is exactly what one would expect from recent shifts in drug education away from the sensationalist yet ineffectual DARE program and toward campaigns informed by social psychology which simply point out that the majority of teens’ peers don’t use drugs. These simple messages rebut the mistaken impressions teens can sometimes get that “everybody is doing it” and are far more factual and effective than the scare tactics of the past. So when one looks at all of the data, it becomes clear that improved educational programs are, in fact, working — but the Massachusetts senators, focusing myopically on only the data which supports their prejudgments, see only gloom and doom.

Elsewhere, the report acknowledges that more teens use alcohol than marijuana, but attributes the difference to “differing social acceptability between the two substances, which could change as a result of marijuana legalization.” Admitted that that could be true, but the best evidence so far indicates that it isn’t likely. In fact, changes in the legal status of marijuana seem to have no appreciable effect on teen acceptance, as demonstrated by a study of California youth before and after the state removed all criminal penalties for the drug. The study concludes that “marijuana decriminalization in California has not resulted in harmful consequences for teenagers, such as increased crime, drug overdose, driving under the influence, or school dropout. In fact, California teenagers showed improvements in all risk areas after reform.” These findings are consistent with other research showing no connection between passage of medical marijuana laws and teen use, but the authors of the Massachusetts report simply ignore these facts.

The report then goes on to recommend various policy reforms, not all of which are bad ideas. But its basic conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt, because many of its assumptions are based on claims which are simply, verifiably wrong.