Marijuana is unapproved by public health organizations

The argument

Legalization campaigns that imply that marijuana is a benign substance present a significant challenge for educating the public about its known risks and adverse effects. Public messaging sets the baseline assumption people bring to a drug, and a campaign that presents cannabis as harmless makes every subsequent warning sound like an objection to legalization rather than information about the substance itself. Against that backdrop, the position of the professional bodies carries weight, because they are not parties to the political campaign. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) does not support the legalization of marijuana and recommends that other organizations or institutions, who have not acted to legalize marijuana, should be cautious and not adopt a policy of legalization until more research has been conducted. That is a claim about the state of the evidence rather than about the drug's morality: it holds that the case has not yet been made, and that a jurisdiction which legalizes first and studies afterwards has committed itself before it knows what it is committing to. The American Medical Association (AMA) goes further, believing that cannabis is a dangerous drug and should be a public health concern, and claiming that the sale of cannabis should not be legalized. These organizations, and many others, claim that overall marijuana use harms the brain and legalization will increase mental health problems, and that marijuana use may also increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders. Those are the specific harms that the bodies responsible for public health are pointing to, and they are the reason a medical framing does not by itself settle the question in favour of availability. Where the relevant public health organizations have not approved marijuana and advise against legalizing its sale, medical marijuana should remain illegal.

Premises

Counter-arguments

In the past, clinical trials to evaluate the effectiveness of marijuana to treat certain conditions have been restrictive and limited. There is a lack of research done by the major public health organizations. A number of the current studies are not controlled clinical trials in which a placebo or alternative medicine is used. Without more of these comparative studies, scientific evidence on the effects of marijuana will be questioned until further research.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] There has not been enough research done to categorically say this.