This article by Hirsh Jain originally appeared in the Cannabis Confidential newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Last week, the New York Times Editorial Board published an Op Ed titled “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem,” urging a regulatory crackdown on legal cannabis.
The piece claims to be motivated by the belief that “a society should be willing to examine the real-world impact of any major policy change” and to “respond to new facts.”
But the Op-Ed does precisely the opposite.
It is built on factual errors, selective omissions, and unsupported assertions that misrepresent the evidence on cannabis in order to justify an anti-cannabis posture.
If anything, the Editorial Board failed to respond to the facts about legalization.
Taxes, Economics, and the Illicit Market
Consider the claim that cannabis is undertaxed compared to alcohol and tobacco.
The Op-Ed states that “state taxes are as low as a few additional cents on a joint.” This appears inaccurate. In most legal states, cannabis is taxed at far higher effective rates than either alcohol or tobacco.
In California, legal cannabis is subject to a 15% state excise tax, a local excise tax that often approaches 10%, and standard sales taxes that frequently exceed 10%, pushing the total consumer-facing tax burden above 35%.
These, however, are only the taxes visible to the consumer. They do not include the substantial “hidden taxes” imposed earlier in the supply chain on cannabis cultivators, manufacturers, and distributors, costs that are ultimately passed along to customers at retail.
Nor do they include the exorbitant state and local licensing fees that legal cannabis businesses must pay, which function as a de facto tax on participation in the legal cannabis market.
And they do not include the federal tax burden imposed by IRS Code Section 280E, which forces cannabis companies to pay effective federal tax rates approaching 70%, more than double those paid by other legal American businesses.
By contrast, alcohol in California faces a beer excise tax of roughly 2 cents per drink. Tobacco taxes, while higher than alcohol, still impose a far lower effective burden relative to retail price than cannabis.
This disparity exists despite a glaring difference in risk profile.
Alcohol and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
Fatal overdose from cannabis alone is extremely rare.
Regardless of one’s personal views on cannabis, the claim that it is undertaxed relative to alcohol or tobacco is not a matter of opinion. It is empirically wrong, and it ignores the far lower risk profile of cannabis compared to the substances our society has normalized and commercialized for decades.
In fact, the persistence of massive illicit cannabis markets in many states where cannabis is legal is itself clear evidence that cannabis is overtaxed relative to alcohol and tobacco.
Alcohol and tobacco do not sustain large illegal markets in the United States because their tax rates are calibrated to keep legal products competitive.
Legal cannabis, by contrast, continues to face substantial illicit competition precisely because taxes and regulatory costs are so high that legal businesses struggle to compete.
The existence of these illicit markets is proof that cannabis is not undertaxed, but just the opposite.
Despite this reality, the Editorial Board proposes raising cannabis taxes further, writing that “if a joint cost $10 instead of $5, it would mean a lot of extra money for someone now smoking multiple joints a day and may change that person’s behavior.”
This claim reflects a startling misunderstanding of basic economics.
Higher taxes do not make cannabis use disappear. They push consumers into illegal markets. This is not theoretical. It is exactly what has occurred in high-tax states like California, where illicit cannabis continues to thrive despite legalization.
The irony is difficult to miss. The Op-Ed laments illegal products like “Trips Ahoy” and “Double Stuf Stoneo” that appeal to children, yet those products typically originate in illicit markets rather than licensed channels.
By advocating policies that weaken legal operators and strengthen illicit sellers, the Editorial Board’s recommendations would directly empower the very actors most likely to sell such products to minors.
THC Caps and the Lessons of Prohibition
This same failure to grapple with incentives and real-world behavior appears again in the Op-Ed’s proposal “to make illegal any marijuana product that exceeds a THC level of 60 percent.”
This suggestion is, once more, dangerously naive. History has already shown what happens when policymakers force consumers out of regulated markets for products they demand.
In 2019, an illicit cannabis vape crisis, driven by unregulated THC cartridges adulterated with vitamin E acetate, hospitalized thousands of Americans and killed dozens of unsuspecting people.
That public health disaster was not caused by legal cannabis. It was caused by prohibition-driven illicit cannabis supply.
Forcing high-potency cannabis products back into the illegal market would repeat that mistake at scale. It would not eliminate demand. It would simply ensure that consumers obtain these products from unregulated sources with no testing, no labeling, and no accountability.
One is left to ask why the Editorial Board does not also propose making hard liquor illegal. Treating potency as the governing principle would mean forcing high-proof alcohol out of licensed stores and back into unregulated production, recreating the era of bathtub gin. We tried that experiment once. It did not end well.
The Op-Ed also indulges in the rhetorical fiction of “Big Weed,” an intentionally loaded phrase meant to evoke “Big Tobacco.”
This comparison collapses under even minimal scrutiny.
Even the largest cannabis companies are tiny compared to major American corporations, and the vast majority of cannabis businesses are small and medium-sized businesses.
More importantly, tobacco kills hundreds of thousands of people annually. Cannabis does not cause the hundreds of thousands of deaths seen each year from alcohol and tobacco. Conflating these industries is disingenuous.
Regulation, Commercialization, and Hypocrisy
The same pattern continues in the Op-Ed’s claim that cannabis is less regulated than alcohol. The Editorial Board writes that legalization has produced “a lightly regulated industry” and warns of “a powerful commercial sector” operating with insufficient oversight.
This bears little resemblance to reality.
Cannabis is among the most heavily regulated consumer goods in the United States.
In New York, cannabis advertising is prohibited on billboards and tightly restricted across digital and physical media, while alcohol advertising is ubiquitous.
Alcohol brands saturate professional sports, name stadiums, and dominate Super Bowl commercials watched by millions of children.
Cannabis retailers face extreme zoning restrictions and are often confined to limited corridors, while liquor stores line commercial streets in virtually every town in America.
We live in a society that deliberately structures its “choice architecture” to encourage alcohol consumption, despite alcohol being one of the most destructive substances in our culture.
Alcohol is sold nearly everywhere and marketed as glamorous, social, and essential to celebration. Cannabis, by contrast, is treated as a pariah product, subjected to exhaustive regulation at every step from seed to sale.
The outrage over even minimal cannabis commercialization is not grounded in public health. It reflects a deep hypocrisy in a culture that aggressively commercializes far more harmful substances while treating any visible cannabis market as uniquely dangerous, despite its far lower risk profile.
And if the Editorial Board were genuinely interested in examining real-world evidence, it would not need to speculate.
Canada has had fully legal, federally regulated cannabis sales for nearly eight years. The dystopian outcomes implied by the Op Ed never materialized.
There was no collapse in social order, no explosion in youth use, and no public health catastrophe.
Anyone sincerely curious about the consequences of legalization could look just across the northern border from New York and see that these claims are not borne out in practice.
Medical Evidence and Scientific Misrepresentation
The Op-Ed’s treatment of medical cannabis is even more indefensible. It claims that “decades of studies on the drug have proved disappointing to its boosters, finding little medical benefit.” This assertion is profoundly disconnected from the evidence.
In 2023, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a 252-page scientific review documenting substantial evidence of cannabis’s medical efficacy across a wide range of conditions, including chronic pain, nausea, multiple sclerosis-related spasticity, and appetite loss associated with cancer and HIV.
This report should be accorded extraordinary weight. It comes from the most respected public health authority in the country, if not the world, and reflects a comprehensive review of the global scientific literature.
The New York Times Op-Ed does not mention it at all. That omission is difficult to explain as anything other than a refusal to grapple with the most consequential evidence available because it contradicts the Editorial Board’s narrative.
The Op-Ed cites no credible research to support its claim that cannabis lacks medical value.
It may be implicitly referencing a recent JAMA review titled “Therapeutic Use of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: A Review,” which has been criticized for serious methodological flaws, including overly restrictive inclusion criteria, failure to account for real-world clinical outcomes, and conflation of recreational and medical use.
Even if one accepted that contested analysis, it would still be dwarfed by the far more comprehensive and authoritative HHS review. Ignoring the latter while asserting that cannabis has “limited medical benefit” is a serious analytical failure.
At one point, the Editorial Board concedes that cannabis is safer than alcohol and tobacco “in some ways,” but conspicuously refuses to say what those ways are.
That omission is telling.
Cannabis is safer in this respect because a fatal overdose from cannabis alone is extremely rare.
It is safer because it does not cause the hundreds of thousands of deaths seen each year from alcohol and tobacco.
It is safer because it does not produce the long-term organ damage associated with alcohol and tobacco, an immense burden on the health care system that all Americans bear through ever-rising insurance premiums.
The unwillingness of the Op-Ed to state these facts plainly reflects a discomfort with acknowledging just how stark the safety differential actually is.
Youth Use, Families, and Work
In addition, the Op-Ed’s concern for children rings particularly hollow in light of real-world evidence.
The December 2025 Monitoring the Future study, conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), found that past twelve-month cannabis use among youth is at its lowest level in three decades.
This is precisely because regulated markets reduce youth access by replacing street dealers with licensed businesses that check IDs and face severe penalties for violations. Regulation works.
The Op-Ed further claims that “people who are frequently stoned can struggle to hold a job or take care of their families.” This is an embarrassing ad hominem assertion unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.
Alcohol, not cannabis, is the dominant contributor to domestic violence in the United States. Research has shown that cannabis legalization is associated with reduced alcohol consumption, which in practice helps reduce violence against women and children.
To suggest that cannabis is uniquely harmful to families while ignoring alcohol’s well documented role in family destruction and cannabis’ role as a substitute is reckless and irresponsible.
The claim that frequent cannabis users cannot hold jobs is equally unserious.
Many of the most economically productive members of society consume cannabis. Cannabis use is even associated with greater physical activity, directly contradicting the caricature of cannabis users as “lazy.”
A peer-reviewed study published in Preventive Medicine Reports found that adults who use cannabis are significantly more likely to meet recommended physical activity guidelines than non-users.
Additionally, research from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that medical cannabis legalization is associated with statistically significant reductions in workers’ compensation claims, particularly in physically demanding occupations.
One reason why is that some workers substitute cannabis for opioids or other pain medications, improving their capacity to work safely and reducing injury risk.
In short, the naked assertion that “people who are frequently stoned can struggle to hold a job or take care of their families” is beneath the dignity of the New York Times Editorial Board.
What This Is Really About
But above all the substantive reasons this Op-Ed is wrong, it is worth asking what this debate is really about?
It is about democracy and personal liberty. The New York Times Editorial Board does not represent the American people on this issue. Even in very conservative states, overwhelming majorities believe cannabis has legitimate medical value.
This Op-Ed reflects a familiar pattern in American public life, where cultural elites substitute their own preferences for those of their fellow citizens and cloak those preferences in the language of science and public health in order to justify restricting how others live their lives.
That is not evidence-based policymaking. It is a refusal to accept the judgment of a democratic public that has weighed the facts and reached a different conclusion.
The American people are not fooled here. They can distinguish real evidence from motivated reasoning.
Efforts to limit the freedom of others by mischaracterizing data and ignoring lived experience do not elevate public discourse.
If anything, they simply erode trust in institutions like the New York Times that once claimed to stand for truth.
also see: CB1’s cannabinoid research repository.
Hirsh Jain is the CEO of Ananda Strategy, a cannabis-focused business advisory firm that works with cannabis brands, retailers, distributors, technology platforms and other businesses on matters ranging from competitive licensing, legislative strategy, regulatory intelligence, market expansion, business litigation, internal & external communication and other varied corporate initiatives.
This article is commentary from an external, unpaid contributor. Views are the author’s. Edited for clarity and style.
