When One Mental Health Crisis Isn't Enough
How high-potency Marijuana will help usher NYC into its next mental health crisis
Back in March of 2021, NYC enthusiastically pushed forward with the legalization of recreational Marijuana. It was exactly one year from the beginning of COVID and the same month as the vaccine's arrival. The streets were still empty, our retail stores abandoned, tourism was dead, and our office buildings closed.
Upon the legalization of recreational Marijuana, smoke shops and faux convenience stores seized the opportunity for cheap rents and flourished throughout the streets of NYC. Their walls were decorated with murals of popular cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone and George Jetson taking bong hits with bloodshot eyes, many of them with concert-grade speakers blasting rap music out into the streets. Despite it still being illegal for retail environments to sell Marijuana, most shops had it on display, selling pre-rolled joints and jars in plain sight. Between the stores hiding the drug sales and others doing it out in the open, we quickly learned that it was now too late to enforce drug sales, as the NYPD appears both shorthanded and discouraged from enforcing many drug-related laws.
Fast forward to present-day NYC and weed is absolutely everywhere. Not just in stores, but for sale on fold-out tables in the middle of places like Washington Square Park and Herald Square. One day I saw a woman park a car with no plates on Lafayette Street in Soho, get out, and set up her tabletop weed shop without a worry in the world. The areas just north of Times Square and much of the Upper West Side now have “weed trucks” parked on main avenues, and all of this only describes the sales aspect. No matter where you are, it is nearly impossible to go about your day in Manhattan without walking into secondhand weed smoke every few hours.
If you had hoped that the only downside of the 1,458 smoke shops would be limited to a boom in Insomnia Cookie shops, I have some disappointing news for you. Following the opening of the new smoke shops, there was also an immediate and sustained spike in armed robbery incidents that occasionally bring things like shootings into neighborhoods where previously incidents like these were extremely rare. Yes, I know that many of the shops sell delicious exotic snacks (like potato chips from Japan) but even left-leaning news sources acknowledge that the robbery element is both real and problematic.
Once the sun sets, smoke shops have unfortunately become a predictable target for armed robberies. Being that these businesses are not federally authorized to use banks there is a significant all-cash base for the lucrative shops. As many NYC businesses still have reduced hours due to slower demand and many storefronts are still abandoned, these combined trends result in places like smoke shops and bodegas being the only thing open after a certain hour.
As if turning scenarios like those in The Wire into reality wasn’t crazy enough, NYC is now doubling down by opening its first 36 legal Marijuana dispensaries. Businesses that will inevitably bring more of the same problems to neighborhoods that were undeniably much safer only three short years ago. Unfortunately, the crime and chaos at the dispensaries are nothing compared to the crime and chaos caused by the dispensaries, due to the extremely high potency of today’s cannabis. Legal or otherwise.
This is not your father’s cannabis. Actually, it’s up to 1066% stronger than the Marijuana that existed before 1995.
If a drug’s potency is over 1000x stronger than it was when we were in high school, shouldn't we be discussing its current strength level?
Well, that depends on who you’re asking, and if that person is only looking at legalized weed as a potential source of tax revenue. If alcohol increased its potency over time, we sure as hell would be having a serious conversation about what that means to casual drinkers right now, but when it comes to Marijuana, nobody seems interested in getting into the weeds and talking about what it means to normalize usage at its current strength.
So how strong is it?
Levels of THC (the psychoactive ingredient in Marijuana) used to be around 3% and now range anywhere between 15-35%, with one particular form (dabs) ranging up to 90% THC. As a result, users are now experiencing increased levels of addiction, depression, anxiety, manic behavior, and psychotic breakdowns that previous generations did not struggle with.
To better understand how newer, stronger, Marijuana has affected people long term, we have to look at what’s going on in other states that adopted legalization earlier, like Colorado which opened its dispensaries in 2012, and California which has had medical dispensaries since 1996.
A recent report from San Diego claimed their local ER is seeing up to 37 cases per day of Marijuana-induced psychosis. “It’s been steadily increasing over the years. When I started in the 1990s, there was no such thing. Now I see 1 to 2 cases per shift. The most common symptom is psychosis.” - Dr. Roneet Lev, Scripps Mercy Hospital.
Another Colorado doctor said Marijuana-induced psychosis is outpacing amphetamine-related psychosis cases by a magnitude of 20-1.
Even California which legalized recreational marijuana in 2016 is currently moving toward including warning labels notifying users of its potential mental health risks after emergency rooms saw a 54% increase in Marijuana-induced psychosis over the following three years.
Yet while all of these points are extremely relevant to any serious conversation about how marijuana affects cities, it appears the only issue New York’s local government is interested in discussing is how Marijuana-related convictions of the past were harmful, and how we owe something to the people who these unjust laws have wronged.
Of course, expunging their criminal records was not far enough, so we took it a step further than that and granted priority access to dispensary licenses to people with previous marijuana convictions.
Yes, you read that correctly.
The person opening up a shop in your neighborhood and selling highly addictive high-potency marijuana to your child (Marijuana that might help induce your child into a psychotic breakdown) will be an ex-con. They might have done some time in prison. They might know a criminal or two. But you’ll just have to trust our local politicians that this is in fact the right direction for the city.
This notion of doing the wrong thing for society at large but the right thing for people with Marijuana convictions (only 400Kout of 20M residents) once again proves that in the current state of New York politics – We continue to put criminals first, even if it’s at the expense of rising crime and declining mental health for the next generation.
While NYC fails to contain the current mental health crisis that we all witness every day on our streets and subways, rest assured that legalizing high-potency Marijuana is guaranteed to usher us into the next more powerful one.