One of the more popular nonfiction books of the last generation is “Freakonomics”, and rightfully so as it connected a lot of data points that ultimately came to fascinating and often unexpected conclusions. One of the most intriguing chapters chronicled the life cycles of first names in American culture, noting that the most popular names almost never repeated from one generation to the next. The data suggested that the origins of popular names tended to begin in hipper, upscale households, and once the names went mainstream, tended to be copied by downscale parents. And once downscale households co-opted those first names popularized in upscale households, they soon fell out of favor with upscale households. Apologies to any readers with the first name “Amber” or “Kayla”, but they were singled out in the book as the names that were considered “past peak” in terms of their cache. Just about everything in our culture has an expiration date. What is on top of the world today will be considered a joke tomorrow.
With that context in mind, consider the changing fortunes of two vaguely similar consumer products in the last several years….marijuana and tobacco. A poll released in advance of “4/20” shows that a record 61% of Americans now favor the legalization of marijuana, a more than 20-point increase just since 2000 and a threefold increase from two generations ago when marijuana’s public approval numbers were in the toilet. Marijuana has clearly become the cool kids’ drug of choice in the 2010s. Five years ago, no American states allowed legal marijuana consumption. In 2017, eight states do, with more than a dozen more allowing medical marijuana. The sky would seem to be the limit from this point forward. Some regions of the country are probably a decade away from accepting legalized pot, but it seems inevitable given the trendline. And given that all of public policy is about getting momentum and running with it, I expect even the most ardent pro-legalization advocates to be stunned by the degree of normalization we’re heading for, with many of the same jurisdictions that were first in the country to institute smoking bans for tobacco voting to legalize marijuana usage in bars and restaurants. You won’t even be able to take your kids for a meal at Applebee’s without getting a marijuana contact high, justified on the grounds of “people being able to take their medicine whenever and wherever they want to”.
By contrast, the once prolific-nearly-to-the-point-of-majority product of tobacco has fallen on massively hard times in the court of public opinion. In a world where “marijuana gummi bears” are deemed perfectly acceptable—and the young children who end up in emergency rooms thinking mom or dad’s “edible” is candy are dismissed as collateral damage on the road to cannabis freedom—while menthol cigarettes are about to be banned in San Francisco and Oakland, on the grounds that menthol cigarettes that have been around for 50 years “target children”, undoubtedly with a tidal wave of other jurisdictions to follow. Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city council stand poised to raise the already insanely high $10.50 per pack NYC cigarette tax to $13 a pack (just in taxes!!!!), despite a very tangible straight line between New York’s artificially overpriced cigarettes and the death of loose cigarette black marketeer Eric Garner at the hands of craven police officers serving as violent collectors of the city’s blood revenue. A small city in Massachusetts even sought an outright prohibition on tobacco sales a couple of years ago that was rejected following some surprisingly strong resistance in the community. If you’re a tobacco user in America today, the hits absolutely never stop coming. The cool kids continually come after them with the same relentless tactics of a schoolyard bully who succeeds in extorting his first pocketful of lunch money.
Just in case anybody hasn’t picked up on it, I’m skeptical about marijuana….and fiercely critical about those overcorrecting on tobacco. With that said, I’m one of the 61% who support marijuana legalization. I think people should have the right to put whatever they choose to in their bodies unless it’s hurting others. But I don’t come to this decision lightly based on my personal associations. For better or for worse, all of our worldviews are colored by personal associations, and my associations with marijuana have been infinitely worse than those of tobacco. I am not now nor ever have been a regular tobacco user and have never touched marijuana, so I have no personal vested interest in either two, but the life trajectories I’ve seen for marijuana users in my more than 20 years of adult life have been grim. And that’s why I’m astounded at the level of breezy acceptance and indifference afforded to the normalization of marijuana, and the obvious recognition that said normalization will result in vastly expanded usage that will ultimately condemn millions of promising young minds and athletes to a lifetime of greatly reduced productivity.
Nonsense, you say! Reefer madness! I’m a well-adjusted young professional who gets high regularly without any tangible consequences, you say! Fair enough. It may well be a majority of regular marijuana users who get through life without spiraling into the stereotype of a “burnout”. But an honest discussion of legalizing marijuana should account for the significant number of young honors’ students and athletes who will consume this product and check out of life, having no greater priority than their next high, blowing all their college money on pot, and ending up working at a gas station. There are many such people now, and there will be more of them with the normalization that will come from large-scale legalization.
After all, whenever the topic turns to tobacco usage, the singular focus always ends up with the inverse personal association….the “beloved grandma who died a painful death from smoking her whole life”. Statistically this is not the norm, as more than 60% of people who smoked over the course of their lives quit before a demonstrable health impact, and fewer than half of current smokers’ deaths are attributed to smoking. So why, if any discussion of public policy over tobacco use invokes dead grannies hooked up to oxygen tanks, should it be off the table to discuss the young people whose ambitions are lost to marijuana usage? Both are the serious consequences for a minority of consumers of the given products, so why do marijuana advocates shrug off the seriousness of the latter?
And therein lies the most disproportionate contrast in any argument about the two. The consequences of tobacco use are almost entirely long-term, the dark fate of decades of heavy cigarette usage. The consequences of marijuana use are most likely to be near-term, corrupting intelligence and ambition in one’s formative years and coming with vastly higher personal and societal costs. Yet amazingly, at this snapshot in time, the public has been convinced that their children face greater danger from the backloaded consequences of cigarette use decades into the future than the frontloaded consequences of marijuana use today. It’s a genuinely stunning spectacle to behold and it bears some serious speculation on how we got here and how long we’re likely to stay here.
The cliff notes version is that we’re following the trajectory of “Freakonomics” generational name cycle theory, beginning before most of us were born when government cracked down on the growing of hemp and turning strongly against marijuana in the 1930s, not coincidentally at the time when tobacco use began to soar. Tobacco clearly had a better and more organized block of defenders and apologists who succeeded in undermining a potential product rival. With the help of big money, public sector support, and a very effective propaganda campaign, tobacco was up and marijuana was down.
And tobacco had a pretty good run before the house of cards its corporate peddlers built for itself with decades worth of lies about the nature of the product faced its inevitable collapse in the 1990s, setting in motion a full-frontal assault on tobacco that somehow manages to ensure guaranteed market-share preservation for the existing giants in the industry responsible for all of the sins in exchange for a lucrative profit-sharing arrangement with federal and state governments that represents government at its absolute most cynical. Accompanied by a rent-seeking “Big Anti-Tobacco” industry bankrolled with taxpayer money that spreads venom and intolerance towards smokers on public airwaves while loudly advocating for a rising tide of “smoking bans” and soaring tax increases and it was pretty clear cigarettes would ultimately become the consumer item equivalent of the names “Amber” and “Kayla”, falling out of favor with the cool kids and relegated to a downscale legacy demographic that the cool kids find unsavory.
While I’m sure much of the insurgence of marijuana over the same timetable as tobacco’s fall has been organic, the timing certainly was convenient and I’m sure long-suffering marijuana legalization advocates knew that they’d never get a cleaner opening than when all the media and government daggers were pointed obsessively at tobacco. And their promotion of marijuana has been an unqualified success. Just like with gay marriage when that issue got momentum, the tide of support for legal marijuana grew quickly. And here we in are in 2017, where a supermajority of Americans are good with it. So how long can it last before we reach “peak pot” and the cycle starts its inevitable reversal spiral?
My guess is pot’s time at the top of the pyramid will be considerably shorter than tobacco’s was, for one reason above all others…..even its promoters and enablers have conceded a tobacco-style business model complete with a cynical profit-sharing arrangement with government and predatory “sin taxes” imposed on the product’s consumers. It took decades before tobacco products were subject to this kind of business model and a level of taxation that amounted to more than pennies, but once it started, the vicious cycle didn’t take long to hit critical mass. The taxation led to reduced usage, which led to government demanding even higher taxes to fill every imaginable budget hole or item on the public spending wish list, and the insatiable demand for justifying even more sin tax blood revenue in the future led to the emergence of Big Anti-Tobacco, which succeeded in securing a sanctimonious environment of shame and judgment towards “sinners” where the “sin taxes” kept rising but also further reduced usage as the cool kids lost interest and associated tobacco use with “those people”. It’s very hard to imagine this same trajectory failing to play out with marijuana as it did with tobacco, except under a much more compressed timeline given that marijuana’s starting point as a legal product has public coffers depending upon its robust revenues.
So if I’m right, and 25 years from now, marijuana’s surge has played out, what happens next in terms of (temporarily at least) socially acceptable smokeable vices? I suppose it’s entirely possible something new could emerge to replace marijuana, but the speed at which e-cigarettes/vaporizers lost their cache was neck-snapping, with sales already past peak and government quickly rising to kill their competitive advantage so as not to find themselves behind the curve with a replacement to tobacco that doesn’t give them a quick and easy cut of the action financially. My guess is…..as soon as tobacco hits bottom (and it ain’t there yet), its comeback will begin. As the cool kids get the pending message that marijuana is passe and primarily becomes the domain of those awful downscale people, somebody extremely hip and “open-minded” and “tolerant” will put tobacco on the glide path to being cool again. Policymakers are slow to embrace change to the status quo, but usually come around to co-opting the cool kids’ priorities no matter how counterintuitive and/or senseless they may be. And in their effort to secure the comeback, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the concept of “medical tobacco” be born and embraced in my lifetime, premised on past studies suggesting tobacco alleviates symptoms of mental illness and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
I’m 39 and expect this to happen before I die….and then after my time the cycle will probably spin on its axis yet again the other direction. Maybe even the names “Amber” and “Kayla” will become cool again! But the one thing that’s certain is that it won’t take long for policymakers to game the rise and the fall of all of the above for maximum cynical self-interest just as they’ve done so impressively well with tobacco, particularly in the last 20 years.