Well, that was a dopey thing to do.

So says The New York Times editorial board about legalizing marijuana without proper guardrails. It’s hard to believe the Times published an editorial that makes sense, but here we are. And the title is clear: “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem.”

The Times doesn’t entirely recant its advocacy for legalizing weed, but the backtrack is significant. “This editorial board has long supported marijuana legalization,” the editors write. “In 2014, we published a six-part series that compared the federal marijuana ban to alcohol prohibition and argued for repeal. Much of what we wrote then holds up — but not all of it does.”

They acknowledge that they and others made promises of few downsides, and minor ones at that, because marijuana is a supposedly “harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits.” However, they concede, “It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong.”

The Times lists a number of bad side effects from the drug or its legalization. For example, 18 million Americans use it almost daily, three times as many as in 2012, and about three million more than use alcohol daily. The Times says nearly three million Americans “suffer from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which causes severe vomiting and stomach pain.”

Widespread use leads to far more hospital visits for illnesses and injuries from car accidents. For example, one survey indicated that nearly 12 million Americans had driven while high in 2024.

Addiction is also a more real problem than the Times and other advocates initially promised. Yale Medicine researchers found that “30% of current users meet the criteria for addiction.” Another survey indicated that 20 million Americans say they’re always high.

That can lead to a number of other societal problems.

On the flip side, many companies advertise health benefits that simply aren’t true, but there’s little to no regulation of misleading information. The Times says that should change, and that “the government should crack down on these outlandish claims.”

While users are seeing green, companies are raking in the green. The Times notes, “The legal pot industry grew to more than $30 billion in U.S. sales in 2024, close to the total annual revenue of Starbucks.” Estimates are that it will reach $47 billion this year. More revenue means more lobbying, which is probably one reason why President Donald Trump unwisely signed an order opening the door to reclassifying weed in December — a move that would primarily benefit sellers with tax advantages they did not previously have.

Speaking of taxes, that’s one remedy the Times editorial board recommends:

The federal government taxes alcohol and tobacco, for example, but not marijuana. And increases in tobacco taxes have been a major reason that its use has declined during the 21st century, with profound health benefits.

The first step in a strategy to reduce marijuana abuse should be a federal tax on pot. States should also raise taxes on pot; today, state taxes can be as low as a few additional cents on a joint. Taxes should be high enough to deter excessive use, on the scale of dollars per joint, not cents.

On the other hand, that just makes the federal government as dependent on pot revenue as states are already becoming.

Another problem needing regulation, the Times editors say, is potency: “Today’s cannabis is far more potent than the pot that preceded legalization. In 1995, the marijuana seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was around 4 percent THC, the primary psychoactive compound in pot. Today, you can buy marijuana products with THC levels of 90 percent or more. As the cliché goes, this is not your parents’ weed.”

THC causes the “high” when smoking. It’s nasty stuff, and it’s arguably the main driver of addiction and illness.

Their conclusion is … eminently reasonable: “The unfortunate truth is that the loosening of marijuana policies — especially the decision to legalize pot without adequately regulating it — has led to worse outcomes than many Americans expected. It is time to acknowledge reality and change course.”

Yet their solutions are hardly satisfying, and many problems go unaddressed by the editors.

Smoking tobacco products is widely prohibited in public spaces, in large part due to the negative health effects of secondhand smoke. The Times never mentions the same thing about marijuana (and THC), or that our city streets increasingly reek of the skunk-like odor of pot.

The words “mental health” never appear in the Times editorial, yet we’ve written about various psychotic and mood disorders, including the correlation between smoking pot and schizophrenia. Cannabis use disorder has been linked to as many as 30% of schizophrenia cases in young men — who happen to use weed more widely than other demographic groups.

Many of those effects eventually lead to other problems, such as job loss, family troubles, and homelessness (read: vagrancy). Again, none of that is mentioned by the Times.

In short, the mea culpa is a welcome one, but it’s too little, too late. The states, the federal government, and American society at large opened Pandora’s box, and closing it again will prove extremely difficult, if not impossible.

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