Cannabis, Culture and the War of the Tribes

A major new review published in The Lancet Psychiatry examining global cannabis policies ought to have settled the argument.

Instead, it will almost certainly deepen it.

Indeed, I suspect the review will keep both tribes happily supplied for years to come. Drug policy, after all, has become not merely a disagreement about evidence but an entire ecosystem of campaigners, academics, advocacy organisations, commentators and institutions, each with its own preferred narrative, constituency and intellectual investments.

Wars of ideas, like all wars, acquire their own economies.

The review examined evidence from countries that have liberalised cannabis laws between 2000 and 2025. Its conclusions were nuanced. Decriminalisation alone does not appear to produce the dramatic increases in use and social collapse long predicted by some opponents of reform. Equally, where cannabis has become a heavily commercialised product, as in parts of North America, use rises, potency rises, and so too do rates of cannabis-related harms, including psychosis.

One might imagine such findings would encourage humility.

Do not hold your breath.

Drug policy debates long ago ceased to be arguments about evidence. They more closely resemble medieval wars of religion in which each side marches into battle already convinced of its own righteousness and merely raids the scientific literature for supporting quotations.

The prohibitionists will point triumphantly to psychosis, addiction and rising potency and declare themselves vindicated. The reformers will note that decriminalisation has not produced social Armageddon and proclaim victory of their own.

Both sides will discover, with touching predictability, that the science confirms precisely what they believed before they opened the paper.

This is because the dispute has never really been about cannabis.

It is about what it means to be human.

The reform tradition, broadly speaking, begins with liberty. Adults should be free to make choices about their own bodies provided they do not directly harm others. Criminal sanctions are seen as an unjust intrusion by the state into private life.

The prohibitionist tradition begins with vulnerability. Human beings are not isolated atoms but social creatures whose actions reverberate through families, communities and generations. Freedom matters, but so too do duties, obligations and social norms.

Neither position is entirely wrong.

Human beings are indeed moral agents deserving of liberty and dignity. Yet they are also creatures of appetite, imitation and self-deception, astonishingly adept at convincing themselves that what they desire is what they need.

Addiction adds a further complication. It is not simply a pattern of consumption. It is a condition that progressively narrows freedom itself. One of the cruellest features of addiction is that it gradually impairs precisely those faculties on which liberal societies place such weight: judgement, foresight, self-command and the capacity to choose otherwise. Recovery communities have long recognised this paradox. People do not begin using because they have no choices. They continue long after the point at which choice has become profoundly constrained.

This is not to deny agency. People recover every day. But neither should we romanticise addiction as merely one lifestyle choice among many. Addiction is, among other things, the progressive erosion of the freedom it initially promises.

C. S. Lewis warned that education without values merely makes man “a more clever devil”. One might say something similar about modern drug policy.

Policy without anthropology merely produces more sophisticated mistakes.

For decades, the debate has revolved around a binary choice: legalise or prohibit.

Yet the new evidence suggests that this may be the wrong argument altogether.

The legal status of cannabis matters.

But what appears to matter just as much, perhaps more, is whether society permits the emergence of a profit-driven industry dedicated to increasing consumption.

The review found that highly commercial cannabis markets are associated with increased use, greater potency and greater harm.

This should surprise absolutely nobody. Alcohol, Tobacco, Gambling and Prescription opioids already taught us this.

The remarkable thing is not that cannabis appears to follow the same pattern. The remarkable thing is that we continue to express surprise when it does.

Markets are magnificent servants and terrible masters. They excel at satisfying human wants. They are far less accomplished at helping human beings distinguish between wants worth satisfying and appetites best restrained.

Once profit depends upon increasing consumption, powerful incentives emerge to normalise use, minimise risks and create lifelong customers. Consumers become markets. Suffering becomes opportunity. Addiction becomes a business model.

Curiously, many on the political left, who would never dream of entrusting education, healthcare or prisons to multinational corporations, appear remarkably sanguine about creating a multibillion-pound cannabis industry. Equally, many on the political right, who rightly lament family breakdown and social fragmentation, often underestimate the role these very conditions play in driving addiction.

Both tribes see part of the truth. Neither sees the whole. Yet both tribes also share an unspoken assumption: that addiction is principally a problem to be managed. They disagree fiercely about the machinery, but not about the managerial premise itself.

One reaches instinctively for criminal justice.

The other reaches for public health, regulation and harm reduction.

Both place considerable faith in systems.

Both assume that with sufficient expertise, the correct institutional arrangements and the right incentives, addiction can ultimately be brought under control.

But addiction has a habit of humbling systems.

Tolkien understood something that modern policymakers have forget. The Ring could not be used to defeat evil because the very act of wielding it changed the one who wielded it. Again and again, drug policy falls prey to the same temptation: the belief that sufficient power, properly arranged, can finally master the human condition.

One side places its faith in prohibition. The other places its faith in markets and regulation. Both are tempted by managerial salvation.

Both overestimate the capacity of systems to repair souls.

Perhaps the greatest weakness in contemporary drug policy is its relentless reductionism. Addiction is framed as a criminal justice problem, a medical problem, a regulatory problem or a market problem.

Rarely is it understood as a profoundly human problem.

No law can provide meaning. No market can manufacture belonging. No prescription can create purpose.

Recovery communities have long understood something that policy people & debates forget: human beings rarely recover because a regulation changed.

They recover because somebody believed in them. Because somebody walked alongside them. Because somebody held hope for them when they had none left for themselves. Because they were reconnected to relationships, responsibilities, meaning and love.

A growing body of evidence suggests that addiction and deaths of despair flourish not merely where drugs are available, but where social bonds have frayed, trust has diminished and people have become disconnected from the relationships and institutions that give life meaning.

The problem may not simply be what people are consuming. It may be what they are missing. Strong families, stable communities, meaningful work, mutual aid, faith communities, social trust and accessible pathways into recovery remain among the most powerful protections against addiction ever discovered.

Their erosion has coincided with rising deaths of despair across much of the developed world.

This does not mean drug policy is unimportant. It matters enormously.

But the search for the perfect drug policy increasingly resembles a drunk searching for his lost keys under the streetlamp because that is where the light happens to be.

The deeper causes of addiction often lie elsewhere: in loneliness, trauma, despair, alienation and the collapse of the institutions that once taught us who we were, what we owed one another and what made life worth enduring.

Science can tell us what tends to happen under different policy regimes.

It cannot tell us what kind of society we ought to become. It cannot tell us what forms of life are worth encouraging, what virtues are worth cultivating, or what conception of the common good we wish to serve.

Those are not scientific questions.

They are moral, cultural and ultimately civilisational questions.

And they remain, perhaps, the central political questions of our age.

Source: Annemarie Ward

Reference

Freeman, T. P., et al. (2026). International cannabis policies and their association with cannabis use, cannabis use disorder, and psychosis: a narrative review. The Lancet Psychiatry.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(26)00087-8/abstract