Trump’s Marijuana EO Is Woefully Half-Baked

This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reclassify marijuana from being a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 drug. This follows another executive order only a few days earlier that designated fentanyl as “a weapon of mass destruction.” So, in the same week that Trump places fentanyl in the same category as nuclear bombs and lethal bioweapons, he put marijuana in the same category as Tylenol with codeine and testosterone shots.

While the executive order on fentanyl clearly intends to communicate Trump’s strong opposition to a poison that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, his reclassification of marijuana suggests an openness to a drug as potentially wholesome recreation, despite its many drawbacks for individuals and communities. Trump’s order doesn’t federally legalize marijuana but would ease tax burdens for cannabis businesses and facilitate more research, which is expected in turn to make the cannabis business more profitable and cannabis more widely available.

Twenty-two Republican senators had written to Trump earlier this week urging against reclassification: “Facilitating the growth of the marijuana industry is at odds with growing our economy and encouraging healthy lifestyles for Americans,” they wrote.

Trump should rethink his support for weed. Increasing the normalization and legalization of pot will only introduce more problems to a nation that has enough to worry about.

Damaging to Health

The health risks of marijuana are legion: studies have found increased risk of heart attack, stroke, schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, and depression. “THC, marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient, soaks into the brain and binds to receptors that are involved in executive function, decision-making, coordination, memory and emotion. Teenage brains are especially vulnerable to the drug’s ill effects and have shown changes on medical imaging that are linked to impaired decision-making and psychosis,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

Marijuana is also a gateway drug. According to a study on this topic, “A large proportion [almost half] of individuals who use cannabis go on to use other illegal drugs.” If a person can justify regularly smoking a joint to relax and escape his problems, he can easily do the same with other substances, especially if his reasoning capacity has been damaged.

Marijuana use has fueled our homelessness crisis too.

Even if one tries to liken the unhealthy effects of pot to those of alcohol, this does not somehow make it okay to commercialize it, especially when newer strands of cannabis are over ten times more potent than 50 years ago. The latest executive order ensures ever more ways for people to waste their money, ruin their health, and become permanently dumber.

Trump likely senses a great business opportunity with the development of different medical cannabis products. As he recently stated, reclassification “leads to tremendous amounts of research that can’t be done unless you reclassify. So we are looking at that very strongly.”

Just Look Around

To see cannabis’ ill effects, one only needs to look around at what the uninhibited selling of marijuana has done to American cities. In those states leading the charge, such as Colorado, the effect has been mostly negative: more car accidents, psychosis, and unemployable, low-achieving potheads.

Coupled with this is the kind of cannabis-inflected blight that mars cities, towns, and suburbs. Like stores selling liquor or adult videos, dispensaries are often ugly on the outside and signal decadence. Visitors beholding the great natural beauty of the Rocky Mountains are forced to block out the sight of these dirty off-white buildings adorned with the green signs in the foreground.

Here in Texas, cities and suburbs have seen a proliferation of vape and smoke shops advertising all varieties of products loaded with THC and other potent psychotropic chemicals derived from cannabis. These storefronts are crammed with garish neon signs and colorful advertisements to lure in customers. In the past decade, these places somehow managed to be trashier and more ubiquitous than any convenience store or unkempt Walmart, yet can be found in even in the most affluent neighborhoods.

The vast influx of public funds that come from allowing marijuana sales are never as much as projected by its advocates. Much of the money made by taxing weed goes right back into addressing problems caused by legalizing weed in the first place.

Trump’s reclassifying marijuana does not mean families and cities should stop pushing back. The nation’s future is not in marijuana, but in responsible citizens who know how to acknowledge the truth and “just say no.”

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher and freelance writer in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written for essays for The American Mind, The Stream, Religion and Liberty, The Blaze, and elsewhere. He is also the host of “The Everyman Commentary Podcast.” Follow him on X.