Cannabis: From a Schedule 1 Drug to Reducing Alcoholism and Workplace Injuries

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Asif Suria discussed Cannabis: From a Schedule 1 Drug to Reducing Alcoholism and Workplace Injuries, here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Tobias: So, talk to us a little bit about the cannabis industry, because when the legalization happened, around 2020, 2019, something like that?

Aaron: Well, so, there hasn’t been legalization from a federal perspective. There have been different states– In Canada, they legalized it in 2018, I believe. Different states have been legalizing it despite it being federally illegal. And so, it’s classified as a Schedule 1 drug, according to The Controlled Substances Act, which is absurd.

Part of what I do is deep dive research. I don’t do day trading. So, just researching the plant, the history of the plant, it’s actually horrifying. You had Nixon basically went against his own conservative panel who said, “You should just decriminalize cannabis.” And instead, they were like, “Well, we want to target African-Americans and people against the Vietnam War. But let’s make it as if it’s as bad as or worse than fentanyl, heroin and everything you could imagine. We’ll just place it right there, so we can just go right at it.” And that’s what they did.

We’ve had a history, actually started in the 1930s, all mostly based around race, both African-American racism against Mexicans, Hispanic people, where it was not based on fact or anything like that. And then, what’s happened is you had Colorado and California legalize it, and society did not collapse.

Jake: Got down. Yeah. [chuckles]

Aaron: And then what’s happened is we have this unique thing in the US, where every state is like a laboratory. And so, other states saw it and started legalizing either medical or adult. I think about half the states are adult in every state, except three or four have medical– And now the big question is, well, how do you legal– It’s no longer…

There’s still some crazy people who think that it is this awful thing that’s going to destroy people and society. But that’s been–

Jake: Nancy Reagans.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s very much been disproven by the data. This is actually really important is, what you find is that everything gets a little bit better wherever you legalize. One of the data points that really got me was, when I read that workers comp claims go down wherever cannabis is legalized, and I was like, “What?” This has helped– So, part of how I’ve approached cannabis is thinking about, “Well, what is cannabis actually doing?” One of my lenses, the way that I view cannabis is I think of it as the great replacement. What it’s doing is it’s replacing substances that Americans are already consuming.

What the workers comp claims show you is that people are consuming really toxic things to help them get through the day. It could be an injury, it could be mental, it could be emotional, it could be whatever. They’re just getting injured more than they’re replacing it with cannabis and they’re getting injured less. You can see this is that you see people drink less, they use less prescription. They don’t necessarily stop alcohol, but it appears, especially for Canada, it’s showing that alcoholism and excessive drinking is plunging since they federally legalized it.

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