Should we regret marijuana legalization? By one recent count, 24 states have legalized marijuana for recreational use since 2012. Seven additional states have decriminalized it to varying degrees, and the Trump administration, in April, moved state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III.

But I hardly know anyone who is happy with how this has turned out, and if I do, they may be too busy inhaling pot to express their opinions to me.

A Pew Research Center survey in January showed that 55 percent of Americans support legal weed for medical and recreational use, but that’s down from a peak of 60 percent in 2021. I’m among that slice of people who have reconsidered whether legalizing would go well. Initially, I had the core libertarian intuition that consenting adults should be able to do with their own bodies as they wish. I have stayed at that point, but my intuition that this process would go smoothly has taken a real battering.

If you walk through major American cities such as New York or San Francisco, you (and your kid) may smell pot frequently. Yet it was never the intent of the law to have usage so plainly evident in public spaces. Instead, many of us were hoping for a libertarian paradise where everything would be tucked away at home, hidden from public view. That is not what we got, as it seems large numbers of people want to go around smoking marijuana.

Today’s marijuana is also much stronger than what was smoked or consumed by earlier generations. “Pot psychosis” is a common phenomenon, and an increasing body of evidence ties marijuana consumption to motor-vehicle crashes and poor workplace performance. Read more»

Tyler Cowen, “Legal Weed Is A Mistake We Had To Make,” The Free Press (June 26, 2026)

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