ALEX BERENSON: Trump's marijuana order pushes a dangerous lie about drugs

President Donald Trump announced that marijuana will be reclassified from a Schedule I drug to Schedule III, shifting it away from drugs like heroin and ecstasy in its previous category.

On Friday, I debated cannabis legalization at AmericaFest 2025, the annual convention for Turning Point USA, the group led by Charlie Kirk until his assassination in September. Here’s my opening argument:

My opponent this afternoon is Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and a staunch libertarian. Katherine’s pinned post on X calls for the legalization of heroin, so at least she is consistent.

We are a global outlier on this issue. We have reaped nothing but pain for a generation of ideologically driven decisions to make drugs more accessible to both young people and adults.

TRUMP SIGNS ORDER TO RECLASSIFY MARIJUANA AS LESS DANGEROUS DRUG AMID GOP BACKLASH

By "drugs of abuse," I mean drugs that produce a subjective high that makes people want to keep using them and to use more over time. The precise biochemical mechanism and whether the high is stimulating, sedating or intoxicating matters less than the fact of its temporary pleasure. Of course, those drugs include cannabis. Yes, alcohol is a drug of abuse too. So are medically prescribed drugs, from Oxycontin to Adderall to Valium.

Cannabis Culture store in Manhattan, N.Y., Oct. 21, 2022. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Let’s be clear about cannabis. Cannabis — particularly cannabis today, which is very high in THC, the chemical that intoxicates users — is very much a drug of abuse.

When they have been tested in rigorously controlled trials — and they have been tested over and over — cannabis and THC have shown almost no medical benefits. But they have many side effects to both brain and body.

Normalizing drug use normalizes drug use. Pretending drugs of abuse are medicine normalizes it even faster.

Cannabis can cause psychotic episodes where users lose touch with reality and become paranoid that friends or family members want to hurt them. It can sometimes cause those users to become violent in response. It can cause episodes of prolonged vomiting that send users to emergency rooms. It is associated with traffic accidents and deaths. It raises the risk of heart attacks in users dramatically. And, yes, it is a gateway drug.

Now we come to the simple, facile libertarian argument: But alcohol is legal! Cannabis should be legal too. In fact, all drugs should be legal — and again, I do appreciate the fact Katherine was honest enough to say that out loud.

My drug, my body, my choice.

Sounds good. Except that to use drugs is inevitably to risk consequences both to yourself and to other people that cannot be foreseen. Drugs follow their own logic.

The libertarian solution to this problem is to ignore it, to say that users are responsible for their own behavior. If they become addicted, too bad for them.

This theory sounds nice. But it ignores reality.

Two studies reveal stronger marijuana strains increase paranoia rates, especially among users who turn to cannabis for pain and stress relief. (iStock)

A religious person might call that behavior immoral. But one doesn’t have to be religious to recognize it has what economists call externalities. The user feels the subjective pleasure, while everyone else faces the potential consequences.

As a society, we seem to have become desensitized to the potentially horrific consequences of drug use.

We should not be. We must not be.

We — as individuals, and as a nation — must do everything possible to remind people of them. We must discourage it at every turn. That means stigmatizing drugs of abuse, not legitimizing them, not building industries that profit from heavy use and addiction.

It means understanding that every drug is a gateway drug, not just biochemically but societally. Normalizing drug use normalizes drug use. Pretending drugs of abuse are medicine normalizes it even faster.

But whatever the legal status of cannabis, we are not going to put every — or even many — cannabis users in jail. We don’t now, and we didn’t a generation ago.

The question is whether we want to encourage the use of cannabis, of Adderall, of alcohol, of OxyContin, of fentanyl, of cocaine, of every legal and illegal drug. Legalizing cannabis is another step on that path to ruination.

I hope we do not take it.

Editor's note: This column first appeared on the author's Substack, "Unreported Truths."