Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett Griggs. We are living through so many cultural shifts these days, and it can leave us wondering who and what to believe, as long-held beliefs and taboos are being challenged and even overturned.
Well, one of those shifts involves marijuana or cannabis. Increasingly, marijuana is no longer portrayed as a street drug or a gateway to harder drugs, but as a natural, even therapeutic substance. Laws are loosening, dispensaries are expanding, and products that look like candy or soda are now widely available, even in states like North Carolina, where marijuana itself remains illegal. But are policy decisions being made on science, or are we being lulled into a false sense of safety when it comes to marijuana? To help us sort fact from assumption, we're joined by Dr.
Kenneth Finn, editor of Cannabis and Medicine, an evidence-based approach. Dr. Finn is a pain medicine physician with over 30 years of clinical experience. He is bored. Certified in physical medicine and rehabilitation, as well as pain medicine, and he holds a certification in cannabis science through the University of Colorado.
Dr. Kenneth Finn, thanks for joining us today on family policy matters. Thank you for having me. All right, well, let's talk about North Carolina first. North Carolina's Governor Stein has established an advisory council on cannabis.
The goal is to study and recommend options for a comprehensive cannabis policy in our state.
So, talk about this. What do they need to know? And what are we seeing as far as a cultural momentum across the country? You know, when Colorado went down this road in 2000, when we voted on marijuana as medicine, the program was dormant for many years because, you know, there were no dispensaries. Doctors are fearful to recommend because it's not a prescription for fear of loss of licensure.
And then, after the Ogden memo in 2009, the dispensaries blew up across the state to where. At this point in time, there's more dispensaries in Colorado than Starbucks and McDonald's combined. And so it's easier to get marijuana in Colorado than it is at Big Mac or a latte.
So those are the concerns that we have is advertising, ease of access, pediatric poisonings, et cetera. And what happened under the umbrella of marijuana expansion was our opioid crisis got worse because it was supposed to be an opioid substitute. It's supposed to be a good analgesic. And that has not proven to be true. There was a very large study recently that came out in the medical journal called JAMA, J-A-M-A, that showed that all the evidence really doesn't show that it's beneficial for what everybody says it's beneficial for, particularly lawmakers who are not scientists or researchers or doctors.
You don't have a vested interest, right? I'm assuming there's no reason why monetarily or for any other reason that you would oppose this. No, I have no conflict of interest whatsoever. I mean, I'm a physician. I'm a medical journalist.
I'm a scientist. And I like proof is in the pudding type mentality. And, you know, that's why I ended up on the Governor's Task Force Amendment 64 when we voted in Colorado to legalize for recreational purposes. I served on the Consumer Safety and Social Issues Work Group, and I also served on the state's Medical Marijuana Scientific Advisory Council for several years. And because I think policy should be guided by science, not public opinion, etc.
And I think it's happened in every single state that I've helped go down this road. I mean, I think if you're going to do this, you need to have the guardrails in place and potency caps in place because things are going to happen that were at the time in states like Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington. We had what we would describe as unintended consequences. And now those consequences are very well known and understood in all the states that go down this road. And when I speak to state leaders and I tell them this will be your legacy when you start to see increased children under the age of five ending up in the emergency department on a ventilator.
And when people are ending up in the hospital with cannabinoid heparemesis syndrome and when you're going to see marijuana-related driving fatalities increase across the state, impacting our men and women in blue, this is going to happen, whether you like it or not, whether you try to put up those guardrails, it will happen. And that will be the legacy of the people that are wanting this at this time. And I do think it's important for people to know, and I've said this every time I get the chance, is that the people that are pushing and spending huge amounts of money to try to get this legalized in every state are not necessarily these little marijuana growers, but they're like the beer companies. These are the people that want to get in on the ground floor of this. And that's kind of scary.
We haven't done a good job with the legal drugs we already have. I mean, alcohol and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year. We're in the midst of an opioid crisis where people are dying unintentionally from drug overdoses.
So we haven't done a good job with the stuff we already have. And now we're simply adding. Another addiction for profit industry that has very deep pockets and very powerful into another layer to the onion, so to speak, that is causing, and these harms are already well documented, public health and safety concerns. I mean, people are not going to overdose and die from smoking a joint by stop breathing, by respiratory depression, but they are going to have negative health impacts. And that's kind of why I continue to do what I do is simply to educate people on this.
And, you know, it's like the state of Oklahoma, for example, they have more illegal black market weed than anywhere else in the country, surprisingly. And Texas, I just found this out, has 7,000 dispensaries, even though they don't even have legal marijuana. And that's twice as many dispensaries in the state of California.
So this is big money. This is big profit. This is, you know, big tobacco 2.0. It's the same playbook. And that's what people are not seeing.
And I don't really understand why people can't address the elephant in the room saying, we have another substance that is potentially addictive and the addiction. rates now in these potent products is now 30 percent. It's not the 9 to 20 percent it was back in the mid 90s.
So people are getting addiction for this. There is cannabis use disorder and there's all these other negative health impacts that people just simply tend to ignore. And to be honest with you, I think some state leaders can't spell PL. They talk about all this money they're going to make, just like the other industries make a ton of money, but they don't talk about the losses and the societal impacts. What can a state do?
On the federal level, it's still illegal, but you see all these states that are legalizing it. Can one state like North Carolina, if we were to hold the line, can we do that, do you think? And does it even matter at this point? First off, I think it's very important for people to understand that not everybody that uses tobacco is going to get lung cancer or have nicotine addiction. Not everybody that has a beer or a drink is going to get in a car crash or have a problem with alcohol.
And not everybody that uses an opioid is going to overdose and die. I think it's very important for people to understand this. And not everybody. Everybody that uses marijuana is going to have a problem. But the issue is that the products have changed so rapidly in the past five to ten years that we are really in uncharted waters.
We really do not know what the long-term consequences are going to be by adding another substance to the communities that you live in.
Okay, so talk a little bit to lawmakers or for that matter, parents, grandparents, or all the above, right? Because our lawmakers also have families. You've mentioned a few of the dangers. Are there two or three points that you think, if we're going to consider opening this up, that we need to make sure that we understand? It really goes back to in utero exposures.
I mean, so let's go all the way back. And Sanjay Gupta just had a segment on CNN about use in pregnancy, which when I watched it, it seemed a little more promotional than really science-based. The data, the medical data in the literature is showing that the babies that are exposed in utero from cannabis smoke are having problems. There's a very large ongoing study called the ABCD study where they're following over 11,000 children that were exposed to marijuana in utero and what is happening to those children as they age. And the initial report showed that by the time those children are nine or 10 years of age, they're having behavior problems.
Problems. They are having what are called psychotic-like episodes. They're having other negative mental health effects, even though they're not using them, but they are having those problems compared to their cohorts that were not exposed in utero. And then the data continues. NIH published some information that those kids, once they hit early adolescence, are having persistent problems with mental health, suicidality, aggression, poor grades, all this other business.
And then a recent follow-up study shows some neurocognitive problems with those same kids that were exposed in utero.
So that's point number one. That alone should allow or want people to pump the brakes on this. For example, in Colorado, nearly 70% of dispensaries told women to use during first trimester pregnancy. And that is just practicing medicine without a license, from my perspective. Then you get into the child poisonings.
Every single state that has gone down this road, Canada went down this road, and kids get into all sorts of stuff. You will see in North Carolina an increase in children under the age of five. Getting in having poisoning of cannabis. And actually, just north of you in Virginia, there was a woman that's serving 30 years in prison because her four-year-old son died from getting into her edibles.
So, this is not safe. These kids do not process and metabolize cannabinoids like an adult does, and they are dangerous. And they'll say, Well, they're just bad parents. They're not bad parents. Most parents are good parents.
They just happen to allow, or their kid somehow was able to get into their products. Kids get into all sorts of stuff, they get into cleaners, detergents, they'll put anything in their mouth, and cannabis products are not immune to that. And then you get into the adolescent world, which is a very critical period of brain development. And I think that's one of the take-home points: you need to protect your children and you need to protect your children's brains because it's a very critical period of brain development. Actually, they say the brain continues to evolve and not fully develop until the age of 25, some even say 30.
So, delaying onset of use is very important. For example, in Colorado, marijuana is now the most prevalent substance found in completed teen suicide. It never used to be that way. It used to be alcohol. And these teens, they're not overdosing on marijuana products.
It's probably a bi-directional relationship. Are they using because they're depressed, or are they depressed because they're using? It's probably a little bit of both. But no states are looking at that as critically as Colorado.
So I do give the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment some kudos because they have drug test mandates in adolescent suicides. Large states like Texas, which represents about 10% of the entire population, they don't test in completed teen suicides.
So there's a lot of data that we're missing. And if Colorado's data is consistent with the rest of the country, because I don't think adolescents in Colorado are really different than an adolescent North Carolina, why are you not looking at this?
So what would you suggest for a parent, a grandparent? Of course, I'm assuming we need to be talking about these dangers to our kids and our neighbors, but what about on a public policy level? Is there anything that citizens can do to be heard? That's a very good question because a lot of parents and grandparents are supportive of use of marijuana. And it's really about educating not only the children in the second grade, which is a really sad statement from my perspective.
I mean, I think kids should have the opportunity to grow up in a drug-free environment, but I think you can't put your head in the sand and ignore the fact that marijuana is all over the place.
So you have to not only educate children, you have to educate parents and grandparents on the harms, potential harms, of these products because they are not, it's not benign. Dr. Kenneth Finn, for parents, grandparents, lawmakers who want the most credible evidence, where would you point them? And of course, where will they find your highly touted research, Cannabis and Medicine, an evidence-based approach?
Well, that book is available at Springer and on Amazon. And, you know, the reason I did the book was because you can go to PubMed and Google and find whatever you want as it relates to marijuana or cannabis, but it was the only compilation put in one. Resource kind of outlining all of the particular problems associated with the use of cannabis, all the way from emergency department to psychiatry to suicide to driving impairment to the use in the elderly and palliative care. But it's just kind of a compilation of one-stop shop. The data has changed since that book came out and not for the better, mind you.
And I've actually been asked to publish a follow-up book on that, but it takes a lot of time and I have a lot of respect for editors, by the way, because it was a year and a half of my life, I won't get back. But you can go to our website at Isaac. I was a co-founder of a nonprofit called Isaac. It's the International Academy on the Science and Impacts of Cannabis.
Well, once again, we've been talking with Dr. Kenneth Finn. He is the author of the book Cannabis and Medicine, an evidence-based approach, which is available on Amazon and Springer. But also, you can go to a website, as he outlined earlier, called Isaac, which is I-A-S-C-A-C. And another resource would be Parents Opposed to POT.
That's a website. And we're just so grateful that you are out there speaking on this very important issue, Dr. Finn. And thank you for joining us on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
