Cultural struggles and battles rage on in the United States. What’s the joke about who won the war on drugs? It ends with “drugs,” being the victor. The push to decriminalize marijuana across the U.S. has led to a mish-mash of different policies. A recent study concerning marijuana use and youth suicide rates should raise some eyebrows.

Most important to remember, marijuana is federally illegal, which means, it’s illegal. Period. Full stop. What that means for us gun owners, as it stands now – with challenges working to reverse this law – if you participate in smoking dope, you can’t be in possession of a firearm.

The 1936 film “Reefer Madness” sensationalized the effects of marijuana use. According to one account on the history of the film, “Reefer Madness began its cinematic life as a 1936 cautionary film entitled Tell Your Children.” Perhaps quite telling in what the motivations were, it’s noted that the film “was financed by a small church group, and was intended to scare the living bejeezus out of every parent who viewed it.”

The prohibitionist movement on marijuana started in the U.S. nationally in 1937, a year after that masterpiece. That standing of marijuana being illegal continued until Timothy Leary – yes, that Timothy Leary – challenged the 1937 law. It went all the way to the High Court, where the law was found unconstitutional.

Subsequent to Leary’s challenge, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act. Once enacted, it made weed a schedule I substance.

The modern decriminalization efforts of marijuana took off in California. “California was one of the first states to legalise the drug for medicinal purposes in 1996.”

We’ve been looking at almost 30 years of the liberalization of marijuana prohibitions. A recent study looks at an unintended consequence of the move.

Medical, Recreational Marijuana Legalization Associated With Higher Rates of Youth Suicide, Study Shows

Female youth aged 12 to 24 and youth of both sexes aged 14 to 16 living in states with legalized medical marijuana or recreational marijuana between 2000 and 2019 had higher rates of death by suicide than youth in states with no such laws, according to a report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

“The findings translate to nearly 5,000 excess suicide deaths of female adolescents and young adults related to medical marijuana and recreational marijuana legalization,” the report claims. “Given dramatic shifts in cannabis policy over the past 20 years, it is important for clinicians and policymakers to understand potential downstream public health outcomes related to changing cannabis policy.”

The study ultimately found that for female youth living in states where medical marijuana and recreational marijuana were decriminalized, there was a 10% and 16% greater risk for death by suicide, respectively. 

An interesting thing also uncovered, was that in male youth, the overall suicide risk was decreased by 3% in areas where decriminalization is practiced.

The study refers to two different dynamics, MML and RML. MML, meaning medical marijuana legalization. RML, meaning recreational marijuana legalization. The reporting on this study does not address that no marijuana is actually “legal” in any state, which is why decriminalization is being used in this piece.

Were the folks that put out “Reefer Madness” onto something?

A very telling quote from the reporting should be reminiscent of things we’ve heard. To a hammer, everything is a nail. So, for these medical types, everything turns into an epidemic.  “Over the past two decades, U.S. cannabis policy has been primarily profit driven,” the study stated. “Shift to a public health-centric approach is needed.”

If that sounds familiar, it's because gun control activists, including the Surgeon General, say the same thing about firearms. Are the medical types going to be as quick to jump at the re-criminalization of marijuana as they are to restrict our Second Amendment rights? It’s clearly the weed that’s killing these kids, so it must be stopped at all costs, right? Commonsense regulation in the form of blanket bans need to be instituted for everyone, including adults, if we're going to save the children. 

Or, perhaps, as a society, we can look at this pragmatically and agree that maybe minors under the age of 18 should not have access to marijuana? There are in fact some dangers associated with the use of the substance, so let's educate. 

There clearly will be a path forward for the medical and pro-marijuana camp to justify the continued liberalization of the weed laws. And that justification will be a fine roadmap that can be used in truths they likely will find inconvenient.

In the meantime, maybe we all ought to dust off those old copies of “Reefer Madness,” and look at it as the documentary we’re being told by this study it’s akin to.