The World Is Waking Up to the Social Devastation of Marijuana

The DEA just called today’s cannabis the most potent in the history of drug trafficking.

Apr 20, 2026

green cannabis plant close-up photography — Photo by Rick Proctor on Unsplash

I spent nearly three decades in law enforcement encountering marijuana and working with officers who recognized what they were dealing with when they smelled weed. In one case, a traffic crash, I moved a damaged car out of a travel lane only to find a two-gallon Ziplock bag of weed under my foot on the ground that had been flung into the grassy area. The moving van traveling north clearly had more than household goods on its bill of lading. I put the bag of weed on the hood of my patrol car so they would know not to come back looking for it.

Working weed was fun. Think of Sean Penn playing Jeff Spicoli as a stoner. Bloodshot eyes, the giggles, munchies, maybe a cooperative walk back to the patrol car. It was predictable. It was manageable. Little or no psychosis.

That drug is completely gone. It does not exist today. The young cannabis user of today has never been exposed to the mellow drug of yesteryear.

Modern Cannabis

The substance has been bio-engineered to a degree that it bears uncharacteristically high chemical levels in THC [tetrahydrocannabinol] and little resemblance to the low risk weed that made alcohol look dangerous in the late 1980s. The cannabis available today may bear the same name as the drug that myself and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers encountered on the street 30 years ago, but it is a substance of the same name with an incredibly different potency and effect.

Many, including me, were the ripple effect hires of the 1994 crime bill and remember being on the frontlines during the last chapter of our nation’s crack epidemic. We witnessed the survival of the bodies but the terrible cost for families. The drug users punished themselves by their own abuses far beyond what any justice system could impose. Families disintegrated under the pressure and children were scattered to families, foster care, and adoption. Today’s generation euphemize crack cocaine in terms that equate to an overpriced coffee drink.

Today’s drug stories are very different. A friend recently lost his son to a cocaine overdose. Another police veteran friend lost his troubled son to drugs tainted by Fentanyl. They are two loving parents who I worked with closely. Thirty years ago, there was trouble and complication, today there is the sudden and stark absence.

In 2013, I read the significant event sheets that I printed out every morning for chief’s staff. Officers stopped a car and search incident to arrest, they found several grams of heroin in the vehicle. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I haven’t heard about heroin in a few years. Funny how they stopped them a couple of blocks away from the closed down methadone clinic.’

The tide has turned recently

In 2014, the New York Times published a series by the editorial board early in the legalization push of cannabis with the main headline being ‘Repeal Prohibition Again’ creating a legitimacy of debate on a topic that has been bounced about for decades.

Today the new members of the NYT editorial board have a different take. With the perspective of a dozen years of recent history, they traverse their own minefield of issues precious to them, including any economic, racial, or ethnic group being criminally charged for offenses in deviation to the mean of the majority.

To their credit, they completely rethink the attitudes, policies, and laws that have gone into past endeavors. They have not switched sides but have recognized the realities of cannabis liberalization in different states. Cannabis remains illegal under federal code.

David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion, with Emily Bazelon and German Lopez weighed in online, in print and via podcast. Here are a few excerpts of their published discussion.

Bazelon: Also the strains of weed have become so much stronger. As someone who rarely actually uses or smokes it, I feel like with edibles I have to be really careful and start with a really small amount and just assume that it’s going to be way too strong. Or else I’ll wake up in the morning and still be in some kind of fog.

Influential Ohio based NYT editorial voice German Lopez had a lot to offer:

‘But then over time, we saw more and more problems pop up with marijuana legalization. We’ve seen a sharp increase in daily users. More people now use pot daily in the U.S. than use alcohol daily. And that is a dramatic shift. We’ve seen increases in addiction. We’ve seen increases in people going to E.R.s and reporting what’s called “cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome,” which we’ll just say C.H.S., but it’s like really violent nausea. It’s not at all pleasant.’

His personal experience with cannabis was also less than pleasant:

‘I remember making fun of Maureen Dowd’s experience with an edible, then going to Colorado and having basically the exact same experience where I’m sitting in a bed just in a state of panic and completely shocked that this was so much stronger than anything I had been used to. I just was not expecting it at all.’

I’ve previously cited the Breakfast Club appearance of SNL alumnus Pete Davidson where he mentioned his desistance to anything with THC. The co-hosts agreed, that today you need to ‘break off’ a cannabis product to avoid a negative outcome on a single use product. In the same conversation, Davidson spoke about how all of the people he was in rehab with were youth and they were there because of weed.

Some perspective

In 1977, the average THC concentration in seized cannabis was roughly 1 percent. By 1997 it had climbed to 5 percent. By 2022 the DEA was measuring an average of 16 percent in confiscated flower, a sixteen-fold increase in 45 years. Concentrates, oils, and vaping products routinely test between 60 and 90 percent THC. Dabs, a vaping product is regularly tested at 90% THC.

Now the DEA’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment has added something new. Chinese transnational criminal organizations are producing cannabis averaging 25 to 30 percent THC. According to the DEA, this is the strongest marijuana ever seen in drug trafficking history.

Chinese transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) dominate the domestic cultivation and distribution of marijuana, with most grow sites located in states where the cannabis industry is “legal.” These Chinese TCOs are producing the most potent form of marijuana in the history of drug trafficking, with a THC content averaging 25-30%.

Earlier research from The Lancet Psychiatry had already established that daily users of high-potency cannabis were significantly more likely to develop psychotic disorders. A meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin found that the heaviest users were nearly four times more likely to experience psychotic outcomes compared with non-users.

This year, in 2026, JAMA published a retrospective cohort study following 463,396 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17. Past-year cannabis use was associated with significantly increased risk of clinician-diagnosed psychotic and bipolar disorders through age 25. The association was strongest for psychotic disorders.

Not anxiety. Not mild depression.

Psychosis. Nearly half a million kids.

When Psychosis Meets a Patrol Officer

Psychosis is not a medical abstraction. It is paranoia that feels like certain knowledge. It is hallucinations that cannot be distinguished from reality. It is a person who is genuinely terrified of something that does not exist, standing in front of an officer who has no idea why. A review published in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that cannabis use was a risk factor for violent behavior in patients with psychosis.

A separate meta-analysis of youth populations found that cannabis users were more than twice as likely to engage in physical violence compared to non-users. In California, Bryn Spejcher stabbed her boyfriend more than 100 times after consuming high-potency marijuana. Her defense successfully argued that cannabis-induced psychosis caused her to lose touch with reality entirely. Again, this was a ruling in California, a state with a legalization of recreational cannabis.

More courts are now wrestling with cannabis-induced psychosis as a criminal defense, and some jurisdictions are accepting it. In Connecticut, prosecutors argued that cannabis-induced psychosis contributed to a double homicide in Bridgeport.

California emergency rooms reported a 53 percent increase in cannabis-related visits in the three years following legalization. In 2014, people with cannabis use disorder accounted for 11 percent of all psychosis cases arriving at emergency rooms, totaling 90,000 cases and 250 per day, triple the number from 2006. That was before today’s concentrates became widely available.

The drug being legalized in state after state is not the drug those policy debates were built around. When Colorado voters approved Amendment 64 in 2012, average THC was about 12 percent. Today’s legal dispensary shelves carry flower testing at 25 to 30 percent and concentrate products (dabs) that reach 90 percent.

How can law enforcement succeed?

Law enforcement has been slow to make the connection, in large part because the opioid crisis consumed so much attention and resources. But cannabis-induced psychosis is showing up in use-of-force incidents, in emergency rooms, and in courtrooms. Officers who are not trained on what high-potency intoxication looks like are going to make decisions without the information they need.

Standard police training needs to reflect the current threat. A recruit who learned about marijuana intoxication from a 2010 curriculum learned about a different drug.

Departments must update their training on drug recognition, mental health crisis response, and de-escalation to account for what high-potency cannabis intoxication actually looks like. We need to recognize that the product changed faster than the policy conversation did. This drug has changed. The risks have changed. The encounters are changing. Pretending otherwise helps no one except the people profiting from the sale of increasingly dangerous products.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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