{"id":20453,"date":"2025-12-20T18:23:45","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T17:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=20453"},"modified":"2026-02-17T20:12:54","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T19:12:54","slug":"reefer-madness-is-here-can-the-last-drug-warrior-beat-back-big-weed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2025\/12\/reefer-madness-is-here-can-the-last-drug-warrior-beat-back-big-weed\/","title":{"rendered":"Reefer madness is here – can the last drug warrior beat back Big Weed?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kevin Sabet\u2019s message is getting through. Credit: Getty<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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by Sohrab Ahmari – US editor of UnHerd<\/em>\u00a0 – 29 Nov 2025\u00a0<\/span><\/h5>\n<\/div>\n
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In June 2014, Maureen Dowd published a\u00a0column\u00a0that has since acquired legendary status in drug-policy circles. In it, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/i>writer recounted her experience trying a marijuana candy bar on a visit to Denver not long after Colorado legalized pot. After a calm first hour, the drug plunged her into a personal hell: panting, shudders, confusion, deep paranoia. Eventually: \u201cI became convinced that I had died, and no one was telling me.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Social media gently mocked Dowd when her column first appeared:\u00a0silly Boomer, she didn\u2019t dose it right \u2014 couldn\u2019t handle the ride.\u00a0<\/i>Momentum for legalization was gathering back then, driven by the anti-antidrug Left, the free-market Right, and lobbyists and entrepreneurs who could just hear the\u00a0cha-ching\u00a0<\/i>sounding from the next big vice industry. Twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia would follow in Colorado\u2019s footsteps in the decade that followed.<\/span><\/div>\n
The picture of weed shared by many older Americans, drawn from their own college years, helped ease the path of legalization. Weed, the mellow drug. The Cheech-and-Chong drug. The Grateful-Dead-road-trip drug. The munchies drug. The drug that, if anything, makes you\u00a0overly cautious<\/i>\u00a0behind the wheel. Dowd thought of marijuana along similar lines \u2014 that is, until she tried the legalized stuff for herself and nearly lost her ever-loving mind.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Since then, weed potency has only intensified, with some concentrates reaching near-pure levels of THC, the plant\u2019s primary psychoactive compound. Only now are policy makers and opinion elites reckoning with what Big Weed has wrought: \u201cturning a drug that used to be 5% THC, and made people pass out for a few hours and eat Cheetos, into one that triggers psycho killers,\u201d as Kevin Sabet, a former drug adviser in successive Democratic and GOP administrations, tells me.<\/span><\/div>\n
Sabet admits that such talk can make him sound like\u00a0Reefer Madness<\/i>, the classic anti-weed propaganda film from 1936. \u201cBut if you look at almost every single mass shooting in this country, there are many common denominators, and one of them is a substance. And it\u2019s not alcohol, and it\u2019s not meth, and it\u2019s not fentanyl. So you can guess what it is. It\u2019s marijuana.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Take Robert Westman, the 23-year-old who murdered two children and wounded 30 people in a gun rampage at a Minnesota Catholic school in August. In his diaries, Westman, who both used weed and worked at a dispensary, blamed the drug for his violent tendencies. \u201cGender and weed fucked up my head,\u201d\u00a0he wrote. \u201cI wish I never tried experimenting with either. Don\u2019t let your kids smoke weed or change gender until they are, like, 17.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
A\u00a02025 study, published in the\u00a0East Asian Archives of Psychiatry<\/i>, found a definite and growing link between US mass-shooting perpetrators and the use, possession, and distribution of cannabis. Moreover, the researchers found that younger mass killers are more likely to be involved with marijuana. They concluded that the drug is particularly harmful to \u201csubgroups of individuals\u201d prone to such violent eruptions.<\/span><\/div>\n
Even if they don\u2019t go full Columbine, young people who regularly use today\u2019s high-potency varieties are at elevated risk for psychosis, per a 2019 study\u00a0published in\u00a0Lancet Psychiatry<\/i>. King\u2019s College London, home to the lead author,\u00a0sums up the grim finding: \u201cIn cities where high-potency cannabis is widely available, such as London and Amsterdam, . . . a significant proportion of new cases of psychosis are associated with daily cannabis use.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Things have gotten so bad that\u00a0The Guardian<\/i>, which once pooh-poohed concerns about weed, now regularly runs warnings about its\u00a0adverse effects on health\u00a0(it doubles the risk of heart death, to mention just one recent finding). Most recently, the paper took readers inside a pioneering London clinic specially dedicated to addressing\u00a0cannabis psychosis. It\u2019s a crisis that goes far beyond a typical \u201cbad trip,\u201d shattering minds and leading many users to take their own lives.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cWe are dealing with a fundamentally different drug,\u201d says Sabet, \u201cthat has been genetically modified and bred by a powerful industry that we are now sanctioning and encouraging, and allowing to contribute to inaugurations.. . . The fact that we are allowing this, to me, that\u2019s immoral.\u201d Despite bipartisan opposition from a pro-weed lobby led by the likes of John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker, Sabet\u2019s calls for limits have begun to break through.<\/span><\/div>\n
Most notably, Sabet has led the campaign urging President Trump not to remove marijuana from Schedule I, the most serious category in the federal government\u2019s scheme for classifying drugs. As he wrote in\u00a0a widely read\u00a0UnHerd\u00a0<\/i>essay, reclassification wouldn\u2019t mean federal legalization. But it would grant the drug a false federal \u201cimprimatur of being safer,\u201d thus allowing Big Weed to enjoy tax deductions from which they are currently barred.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
So far, Sabet\u2019s campaign seems to have stayed Trump\u2019s hand, even as the president has floated the idea of\u00a0Medicaid coverage of marijuana products\u00a0as a stress and pain balm for seniors. \u201cThis [reclassification] isn\u2019t a priority for the president,\u201d Sabet tells me. \u201cBut on the other hand, there are some lobbyists and maybe friends of his son-in-law and others in the business\u201d who would benefit from rescheduling and its associated tax benefits, meaning Sabet\u2019s work is far from over.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Kevin Sabet came to the drug problem from an unusual personal angle. Born in the Midwest to a Bahai family that left Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he remembers a childhood in which he didn\u2019t know anyone who so much as drank. (The Bahai religion, which is persecuted by Iran\u2019s ruling Islamists, preaches the unity of all faiths \u2014 and total abstinence). When he moved to Orange County\u00a0as a teenager, his perspective was radically different from that of his peers. And what he saw of addiction encouraged him to fight it.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
As an undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-\u201990s, he says, \u201cI saw the influence of the [drug] culture. I saw marijuana shops before that was even a thing.\u201d Then the rave culture arrived, giving rise to what he describes as a \u201cmini-epidemic\u201d associated with the hallucinogen ecstasy, also known as MDMA. As a student, he\u2019d go to clubs and hand out postcards showing scans of drug-addled brains on one side, and a call-for-help number on the other.<\/span><\/div>\n
His activism won him some attention in the press \u2014 and then a phone call from Barry McCaffrey, the retired US Army general then serving as President Bill Clinton\u2019s drug czar. \u201cI thought the call was fake,\u201d Sabet recalls. But it wasn\u2019t. Gen. McCaffrey was offering him a job as a speechwriter. Sabet accepted and moved to Washington before heading to Oxford to earn a master\u2019s degree in social policy.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cWeed potency has only intensified, with some concentrates reaching near-pure levels of THC.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
After 9\/11, many of Sabet\u2019s friends went off to Afghanistan in defense of the homeland, and he felt guilty writing papers at \u201cOxford, of all places, a comfortable place.\u201d As it happens, the White House called again \u2014 this time, the George W. Bush administration with an offer to hire him as a senior speech writer on drug policy. \u201c \u2018We want you to serve your country,\u2019 \u201d he remembers the caller saying. \u201c \u2018We know you\u2019re not a Republican, but we also know you\u2019re not a Democrat, and that\u2019s fine with us.\u2019 \u201d (His politics, as far as I can tell, are:\u00a0whatever will stop this scourge.<\/i>)<\/span><\/div>\n
Yet another White House stint came during the Obama administration, which tapped him as senior drug-policy adviser (by then he\u2019d finished his master\u2019s and a doctorate at Oxford). It was around that time, the 2010s, that marijuana legalization went from a pothead\u2019s dream to a serious business and political enterprise. Weed, the legalizers said, is harmless. Sabet disagreed, and he published a book,\u00a0Reefer Sanity<\/i>, to push back against the complacent mythology.<\/span><\/div>\n
The book, in turn, led to his founding of a restrictionist advocacy group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, or SAM, today the most visible drug-policy organization in Washington (a telling indicator of the growing concern about Big Weed).<\/span><\/div>\n
But why the focus on marijuana? Why not the likes of fentanyl or heroin? Marijuana, Sabet answers, \u201cis the most dangerous drug in my mind because it\u2019s the most misunderstood.\u201d There was a time when one could \u201cexperiment\u201d with pot as part of the transition to adult responsibility and success. \u201cThe marijuana of today is doing the opposite,\u201d he says, potentially derailing a person for life. \u201cIt\u2019s causing violence, it\u2019s causing erratic people to lose any sense of reality.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
And it\u2019s addictive, a truth that Americans are still reluctant to accept. Sabet recalls speaking to a large group about the addiction angle, only for a member of the audience to tell him during the Q&A portion: \u201cI use it every day, Kevin, and I\u2019m qualified to tell you it\u2019s not addictive.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
The numbers say otherwise. As the\u00a0Associated Press\u00a0reported on Tuesday, regular use of marijuana has now outpaced drinking, with 18 million Americans reporting daily use, up from fewer than 1 million in the 1990s. In tandem, there has been an explosion in diagnoses of cannabis-use disorder \u2014 an insatiable craving for the drug that leaves people incapable of fulfilling ordinary responsibilities; 1 in 3 pot users suffers from it, with symptoms classified from mild to severe.<\/span><\/div>\n
But aren\u2019t alcohol and tobacco just as destructive? Why not call for a new Prohibition and extend it to cigarettes for good measure?\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cThe reason I would say that Prohibition wasn\u2019t sustainable as a policy in America is because alcohol has been so ingrained in Western civilization, since before the time of the Old Testament.\u201d Then, too, alcohol is associated with human sociality, and for most people, the substance and its effects leave the body after 24 hours. Not so with weed, which lingers for much longer and at a cellular level. Sabet thus dismisses the argument that we shouldn\u2019t restrict marijuana until alcohol is under control: \u201cThat\u2019s like saying my headlights are broken, and just to be consistent, I\u2019m going to break my tail lights, too.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
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As for smoking: \u201cNinety percent of the people who built the Brooklyn Bridge were smokers. They were smoking at the time they built the Brooklyn Bridge. They could function. Maybe it even made them concentrate better,\u201d Sabet says. The cigarette \u2014 unlike tobacco itself \u2014 \u201cis a relatively new invention.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Lung-cancer deaths before the 1920s were almost unheard of. Only with the rise of a cigarette industry did the smoking crisis appear. And that, he says, is also what\u2019s happening with legalized, industrial weed, a product hawked by growers chasing ever higher THC yields \u2014 mental health be damned. Moreover, as cigarette smoking rates decline, Big Tobacco is looking to enter the weed market, Sabet says.<\/span><\/div>\n
So what to do now, beyond restriction (a cause that\u2019s already lost in half of US states)? At the root of the drug crisis, Sabet thinks, is a \u201cmoral and spiritual breakdown.\u201d Drugs, he suggests, offer too-easy answers to the search for meaning; or else they palliate the pain associated with modern life. Even so, Western societies can erect guardrails, for example by hindering the spread of weed advertising to ever-younger audiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
As for those already trapped, Sabet sees a role for behavioral incentive systems, such as programs that offer cash rewards for addicts who don\u2019t use \u2014 or ones in which they face a choice between doing time or going to rehab.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cI\u2019m calling for a new\u00a0effort<\/i>\u00a0on drugs,\u201d he says, aware of the odium attached to the War on Drugs. \u201cI don\u2019t love the war analogy because wars have defined ends, or they should. And this will never stop. We will never stop having to stop drug use among young generations. . . . I embrace aiming for a drug-free society, even if it\u2019s not possible. We\u2019ve never had a violence-free society, but that doesn\u2019t mean that we don\u2019t want to aim for that.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Source : https:\/\/archive.is\/DrvMY#selection-480.0-487.55<\/span><\/div>\n
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Kevin Sabet\u2019s message is getting through. Credit: Getty by Sohrab Ahmari – US editor of UnHerd\u00a0 – 29 Nov 2025\u00a0 In June 2014, Maureen Dowd published a\u00a0column\u00a0that has since acquired legendary status in drug-policy circles. In it, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0writer recounted her experience trying a marijuana candy bar on a visit to Denver not long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,32,129,68,60,40,139,36,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cannabis-marijuana","category-crime-violence-prison","category-culture","category-drug-use-various-effects","category-marijuana-and-medicine","category-prevention-research","category-strategy-and-policy","category-treatment-addiction","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20453"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20457,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20453\/revisions\/20457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}