"When it comes to cannabis, the best-case scenario is that we will muddle through, learning more about its true effects..."

"... as we go along and adapting as needed—the way, say, the once extraordinarily lethal innovation of the automobile has been gradually tamed in the course of its history. For those curious about the worst-case scenario, Alex Berenson has written a short manifesto, 'Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.' Berenson begins his book with an account of a conversation he had with his wife, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating mentally ill criminals. They were discussing one of the many grim cases that cross her desk—'the usual horror story, somebody who’d cut up his grandmother or set fire to his apartment.” Then his wife said something like “Of course, he was high, been smoking pot his whole life.'...  The first of Berenson’s questions concerns what has long been the most worrisome point about cannabis: its association with mental illness. Many people with serious psychiatric illness smoke lots of pot. The marijuana lobby typically responds to this fact by saying that pot-smoking is a response to mental illness, not the cause of it—that people with psychiatric issues use marijuana to self-medicate.... [Berenson] sits down with Erik Messamore, a psychiatrist who specializes in neuropharmacology and in the treatment of schizophrenia. Messamore reports that... he has begun to see a new kind of patient: older, and not from the marginalized communities that his patients usually come from. These are otherwise stable middle-class professionals. Berenson writes, 'A surprising number of them seemed to have used only cannabis and no other drugs before their breaks. The disease they’d developed looked like schizophrenia, but it had developed later—and their prognosis seemed to be worse. Their delusions and paranoia hardly responded to antipsychotics.'"

Writes Malcolm Gladwell in "The Return of Reefer Madness"... [just kidding!!] I mean "Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?/Permitting pot is one thing; promoting its use is another."

You know, "Tell Your Children" — Berenson's manifesto title — is the original title of the movie we know as "Reefer Madness." I think it's very strange that Gladwell never mentions that in his article (which appears in The New Yorker).