Sentences to ponder

~ Jason Schwartz
photo credit: sarcasmo

From the ATTC/NIATx blog (emphasis mine):

Today public health leaders think using marijuana together with alcohol increases the risk for impaired driving. Tomorrow leaders of multinational corporations will think selling marijuana together with alcohol – and tobacco – increases the opportunity for enhanced profits.

One hundred and forty years ago the invention of machines for rolling tobacco cigarettes radically reduced production costs and prices. That triggered consolidation from regional companies to multinationals, and shifted tobacco consumption from cigars to cigarettes and from men to also women. Now the spread of legalization is radically reducing production costs and prices, rapidly increasing firm size, shifting the favored product forms, and shifting consumption from weekend to daily patterns of use.

I do not expect marijuana legalization to match the public health catastrophe wrought by the tobacco industry. But I expect the dynamic energy of the free market to exploit fully the profit potential of this new (to private industry) dependence-inducing intoxicant, and innovation will carry the markets and consumption to places we would have a hard time imagining today.

Published by Jason Schwartz

I have been an addiction professional and social worker since 1994. I started blogging in 2005 as the Clinical Director at Dawn Farm. I no longer work at Dawn Farm and am now the Director of Behavioral Medicine at a community hospital, and a lecturer at Eastern Michigan University’s School of Social Work. Views expressed here are my own. Keep in mind that the field, the contexts in which the field operates, and my views have changed over time.

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