I’m confident that people who show up drunk for work are more likely to get injured or injure someone else, but this study on weed and workplace injury suggests something less immediate and more lasting. The potential for a decline in cognitive agility with long-term use of marijuana might result in more work-related injuries.
Drunks, or those in training to be one, have well-understood immediate handicaps that fade without persistent use, joined later by chronic or terminal conditions resulting from long-term excessive use or abuse. The corpus on legalized or decriminalized marijuana, in contrast, continues to grow. Still, there are well-documented inferences to mental health issues as marijuana is a popular hobby among mental patients. Feel free to engage in “which came first debates,” as I’m sure there is evidence on both sides, but the US Department of Labor Statistics is reporting something we could add to the conversation.
U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics for 2006 through 2020 show that legal “recreational marijuana sales were associated with a 10% increase in workplace injuries among individuals aged 20 to 34 years,” the study authors concluded. … The study was published Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum and co-led by Dr. Joseph Sabia, chair of the economics department at San Diego State University. ..
“Two and 3 years post-adoption, injuries were significantly higher,” the research team concluded.
Among 20-to-34-year-olds generally, on-the-job injuries rose by 10% on average, and when the data focused on folks solely engaged in full-time work, the researchers observed an 11.9% rise.
Correlation does not mean causation, but seeing as we’re in the early stages of this particular human experiment, and the legal weed train (and all the lovely taxes that will spring from it) appears unstoppable, what is society to do about this?
The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behavior are experienced as infringements of basic rights.
For my part, the government need not be much involved until there is a threat to the rights of others, and that threat does not include other states collecting revenues from Granite Staters that we could be collecting here. My primary objection to state involvement has long been their using appetites (liquor and tobacco taxes have long rankled my sensibilities) to accumulate revenue, with which they might then do more serious harm—the same with gambling. I’ve opposed them all on the basis of enriching legislators and regulators inspired to grow government—a far more significant threat to human liberty than any other.
Pretending to set up a slush fund to address addiction to the thing you’re peddling is deceptive misdirection; after all, where’s the slush fund to address addiction to the uncontrolled taxation, meddling, and growth of government?
So, is there some middle ground between the right to put things into your body and the effect it inevitably has on society? We’ve come to terms with alcohol, so many will say yes. And who is to complain if an employee who has harmed their cognitive agility hurts themself unless that results in the harm of others for which there are already laws to punish offenders after the fact?
It may or may not be a thorny question, but if long-term use of modern-day marijuana is proven dangerously debilitating and irreversible, what then? Are we just sacrificing future generations to death by misadventure or, worse, creating a caste of eaters? Our new morals allow us to plumb this state of decline but do not permit us just to erase the results, although there is a movement among assisted suicide advocates to convince them to do just that.
Assuming they survived their workplace injury.
