| > Tell me, how does an article like this improve the actual problem at hand at all? Arguably very few articles improve problems at hand, but for over a quarter of the US population, marijuana is legal recreationally. In Canada, marijuana is legal recreationally. And even where marijuana is illegal, it's often not terribly-well-enforced anymore. New York City, the city this publication is based around, has decriminalized the substance and is no longer arresting people for marijuana possession. The question for this audience is "should I consume it?" and "should we societally start investing in understanding the downsides of consuming large quantities of THC?" Those are the important questions for these people, who live in the post legalization (or heavily decriminalized) world. And we don't have good answers for those people. > it shifts the conversation from what should be illegal to a conversation that is totally irrelevant. The readership of the New Yorker, I would hazard, has already come down strongly on the side of "should not be illegal". It's a liberal publication in a liberal city that has decriminalized marijuana usage, and its readership, I'm almost certain, overlaps strongly with people who are in favor of legalization. Why is the conversation of "is this healthy" not relevant? |