Notable commentators making notable arguments against marijuana legalization

The Weekly Standard has this notable new commentary authored by John Walters (pictured here), David Murray and Brian Blake under the headline “The Risky Business of Commercial Marijuana.”  The authors are notable because they all served in the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the George W. Bush administration, and because there is some talk of Walters serving as the “Drug Czar” in the Trump Administration.  The commentary is notable for a few curious arguments made against marijuana reform, although the piece is styled as a warning to those who might be inclined to invest in the marijuana industry.  Here are the excerpts that I found curious:

[L]egalization advocates have pointed to surging support for legal, recreational marijuana as found in public polling—reaching 60 percent positive, according to recent opinion results.

Beyond concerns over the reliability of polling projections, positive opinion polls on marijuana are of recent vintage, occurring in the midst of an eight-year period where our nation was led by an Administration that downplayed marijuana’s threat, tacitly approved of its state-level legalization, and made no effort to enforce federal law.

Greater acceptance of legal marijuana has also been sustained, if not propelled, by irresponsible cheerleading in the press. Most importantly, this support has been built on assertions that are clearly not true….

As the key arguments for legal marijuana collapse, the public will increasingly confront a much darker reality as escalating reports of harms become inescapable.

There is already evidence that support for legal marijuana is much softer than the advocates assert. Candidates in the last election cycle expecting political support from libertarian conservatives or hoped-for hordes of pro-marijuana college youth, found that they failed to materialize in sufficient numbers to prevent defeat, a lesson that proved costly for the Democratic party….

Investors seeking hot prospects may be better served by ignoring the flashy market assessments issued by investment firms, who really should know better. The position is worsening as more bad news comes in from legalizer states….

All of the dangers have been known for some time — visible to anyone who ignored the hype and paid attention to the drug-dealing facts. Certainly adding to these concerns is the new uncertainty regarding marijuana enforcement in the sharply altered political landscape created by the most recent election. Investors beware.

Elsewhere in the commentary, these authors make reasonable (though debatable) arguments that marijuana legalization does not really address mass incarceration or eliminate the black market to prevent youth access as reformers promise. But the notion of a “darker reality [with] escalating reports of harm” as “more bad news comes in” seems more than a bit too dystopian in light of lots of positive reports emerging from Colorado and Washington. And pointing to the last election cycle to claim that “support for legal marijuana is much softer than the advocates assert” whistles past the critical reality that recreational marijuana prevailed in four out of five state in November 2016 (including California and Massachusetts) and that medical marijuana won big in four red states.

That all said, if the authors of this commentary have a central role in deciding federal policy in the new Administration, the final two sentences quoted above are very significant and the final word say it all: “beware.”