REDUCE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA

The nation is watching to see how Colorado will regulate medical
marijuana. I believe that any legislation implementing the medical
marijuana constitutional amendment should, to be effective, include
certain precautions to offset its negative effects, and not include
dispensaries.

Research at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at
the University of Colorado, and from around the nation, has some
important conclusions for policymakers to consider:

Teenage use of marijuana is causally related to the perceived
approval or disapproval of use. To the extent current or proposed
laws reduce levels of disapproval, we can expect teen use of
marijuana to increase.

Marijuana is a gateway drug for other illicit drug use and serious
forms of delinquency and violence. To the extent at-risk adolescents
and younger children begin using marijuana, we can expect increases
in delinquency and violence by young people.

Once marijuana is routinely taxed and a steady revenue stream is
achieved, it will be very difficult to reverse local and state income
dependence and the implied legalization of the drug will deepen.

Once perceived as legal, especially with dispensaries made legal,
recreational use of marijuana will become more open and pervasive,
and more late-childhood and early-adolescent youth will experience
more legal modeling of marijuana use that will, in effect, lower the
perceived disapproval for its use, and increase delinquency and
violence as a result.

Marijuana varieties with progressively stronger potency also will
become more widely available, with few if any meaningful social or
financial cost boundaries for youth of all ages wanting to obtain it.
As more and more citizens are legally cultivating marijuana, it will
be extremely easy for such purveyors to also cultivate the more
potent varieties. Note the recent case of a couple growing marijuana
in Commerce City whose 10-month-old child had a medical reaction to
marijuana that was in food consumed at home.

Short-term effects of marijuana use include short-term memory loss,
slower reaction time, difficulty concentrating and studying, lower
performance levels, reduced driving ability and increased risk for
accidents (particularly when combined with alcohol). As the
normalization of marijuana continues, we should expect high-risk
students to do less well in school, and traffic crashes and fatalities to rise.

Marijuana can induce psychosis and worsen psychotic symptoms in
persons with schizophrenia.

Those who have never used marijuana will almost never use any hard drug.

With the research predicting these potential outcomes, the state
should consider appropriate measures to track and preempt them. With
state finances at issue this session, a portion of medical marijuana
sales tax revenues could serve as funding for these policy suggestions:

1. Find a way for Colorado school grades 3-12 to conduct a
school-climate survey every other year to assess alcohol, drug and
violence risk conditions and levels of use and behavior.

2. Work to ensure that all Colorado school grades 3-12 with
above-average risk conditions, or levels of use or behavior, can find
the resources to implement evidence-based drug and alcohol
risk-reduction programs.

3. Work to ensure that all juvenile offenders in custody or on
probation with a high risk for alcohol and drug use complete
effective evidence-based drug and alcohol treatment programming.

4. Work to ensure that the state Office of Juvenile Justice and the
Delinquency Prevention Advisory Board for Juvenile Justice can track
alcohol and drug use or abuse and violence in schools and in our
communities -- both reported and collected in school-based surveys,
and make policy recommendations as needed to offset the potential
negative effects of these laws.