Cigarettes and prescription opioids were once touted by the medical establishment—until the fallout from addiction and abuse became too big to deny.
Ben Cort says we’re on the same path with legalizing marijuana and turning it into big business, since any industry with addictive potential follows a similar trajectory.
“It’s just inevitable that in a commercialized market that depends on problem use, you will end up with these 99.9 percent pure THC products,” says Cort. And the problem is, high-potency cannabis is a fundamentally different substance than the 2 percent THC weed hippies smoked in the 1960s.
Cort has a lot of experience in the addiction recovery space, including being a recovered addict himself. He’s the author of “Weed, Inc.: The Truth About The Pot Lobby, Thc, And The Commercial Marijuana Industry,” and he’s on the board of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.