The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

In late December 2025, President Trump loosened the regulation of marijuana in the US.  The Wall Street Journal editorially argued, “Reclassifying marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act doesn’t legalize the drug under federal law. But it does let marijuana sellers deduct expenses from their taxes like other companies. It also sends the signal to young people that marijuana isn’t all that harmful, despite mounting evidence that it is.”

Marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug, meaning it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Trump aims to change it to Schedule III—akin to anabolic steroids—indicating that it has some legitimate medical uses and “a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.”

Was this wise? The Journal makes several strong points:

• A recent review of 15 years of research found the evidence of marijuana’s medical benefits to be weak or inconclusive. “The evidence does not support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids at this point for most of the indications that folks are using it for,” said the study’s lead author Michael Hsu.
• Far stronger evidence points to its potential harm. Trump may not realize that weed today is four to five times more potent than in the 1990s. The drug’s dangers and risks of dependency increase with potency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that about three in 10 people who use marijuana will develop an addiction.
• A study this year found that 40% of car drivers who died in accidents in an Ohio county tested positive for THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Marijuana advocates claim weed is no worse than alcohol. They ignore that cannabis has longer-term impact than alcohol, especially among the young.
• As the CDC says, “cannabis use directly affects the parts of the brain responsible for memory, learning, attention, decision-making, coordination, emotion, and reaction time.” Medical imaging of adolescent brains shows structural changes in areas involved in impulse control and decision-making.  It can cause psychotic symptoms, especially at higher potency. A bag of cannabis gummies can cause a bad trip for some users. The CDC this summer reported that at least 85 people who frequented a Wisconsin restaurant that had mistakenly used THC-infused oil in pizza dough experienced symptoms of cannabis intoxication. Nearly half of those who got sick suffered paranoia and a quarter hallucinated. The number of cannabis-related incidents reported to poison-control centers has surged 23-fold since 2009, mostly among teens and children.
• As we reported last week, young pot users are showing up with rising frequency at emergency rooms with uncontrolled vomiting and psychotic symptoms. One study this year found young users had a sixfold higher risk of heart attacks and fourfold greater of strokes. Yet the same Administration that targets Tylenol—which has proven benefits and minimal risks—now says marijuana is fine.

The cannabis lobby claims rescheduling will allow more research on the drug, but the industry can run trials on marijuana now. It simply has no incentive to do so because it can sell its products in most states without Food and Drug Administration approval.  Trump’s message to teens and 20-year-olds that marijuana is harmless is a recipe for more damaged brains and human tragedy.  That is a fallacious message.

Furthermore, Allysia Finley argues that we consider the work of Bertha Madras.  Ms. Madras is a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost experts on marijuana. Ms. Madras has spent 60 years studying drugs, starting with LSD when she was a graduate student at Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, an affiliate of Montreal’s McGill University, in the 1960s. “I was interested in psychoactive drugs because I thought they could not only give us some insight into how the brain works, but also on how the brain undergoes dysfunction and disease states,” she says.  In 2015 the World Health Organization asked her to do a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses. The 41-page report documented scant evidence of marijuana’s medicinal benefits and reams of research on its harms, from cognitive impairment and psychosis to car accidents.  She continued to study marijuana, including at the addiction neurobiology lab she directs at Mass General Brigham McLean Hospital.  Finley summarizes a conversation she had with Madras, which highlights the dangers of marijuana:

1. For starters, she says, the “addiction potential of marijuana is as high or higher than some other drug,” especially for young people. About 30% of those who use cannabis have some degree of a use disorder. By comparison, only 13.5% of drinkers are estimated to be dependent on alcohol. Sure, alcohol can also cause harm if consumed in excess. But Ms. Madras sees several other distinctions.  One or two drinks will cause only mild inebriation, while “most people who use marijuana are using it to become intoxicated and to get high.” Academic outcomes and college completion rates for young people are much worse for those who use marijuana than for those who drink, though there’s a caveat: “It’s still a chicken and egg whether or not these kids are more susceptible to the effects of marijuana or they’re using marijuana for self-medication or what have you.”
2. Marijuana and alcohol both interfere with driving, but with the former there are no medical “cutoff points” to determine whether it’s safe to get behind the wheel. As a result, prohibitions against driving under the influence are less likely to be enforced for people who are high. States where marijuana is legal have seen increases in car accidents.   One of the biggest differences between the two substances is how the body metabolizes them. A drink will clear your system within a couple of hours. “You may wake up after binge drinking in the morning with a headache, but the alcohol is gone.” By contrast, “marijuana just sits there and sits there and promotes brain adaptation.”
3. There’s mounting evidence that cannabis can cause schizophrenia. A large-scale study last yearthat examined health histories of some 6.9 million Danes between 1972 and 2021 estimated that up to 30% of young men’s schizophrenia diagnoses could have been prevented had they not become dependent on pot. Marijuana is worse in this regard than many drugs usually perceived as more dangerous. “Users of other potent recreational drugs develop chronic psychosis at much lower rates,” Ms. Madras says. When healthy volunteers in research experiments are given THC—as has been done in 15 studies—they develop transient symptoms of psychosis. “And if you treat them with an antipsychotic drug such as haloperidol, those symptoms will go away.”
4. “Marijuana has also been associated with violent behavior, including in a study published [in May] in the International Journal of Drug Policy.Data from observational studies are inadequate to demonstrate causal relationships, but Ms. Madras says that the link between marijuana and schizophrenia fits all six criteria that scientists use to determine causality, including the strength of the association and its consistency.”
5. “Another cause for concern, she notes, is that more pregnant women are using pot, which has been linked to increased preterm deliveries, admissions of newborns into neonatal intensive care units, lower birth weights and smaller head circumferences. THC crosses the placenta and mimics molecules that our bodies naturally produce that regulate brain development.”
6. What about medicinal benefits? Ms. Madras says she has reviewed “every single case of therapeutic indication for marijuana—and there are over 100 now that people have claimed—and I frankly found that the only one that came close to having some evidence from randomized controlled trials was the neuropathic pain studies.” That’s “a very specific type of pain, which involves damage to nerve endings like in diabetes or where there’s poor blood supply,” she explains.   For other types of pain, and for all other conditions, there is no strong evidence from high-quality randomized trials to support its use. When researchers did a “challenge test on normal people where they induce pain and tried to see whether or not marijuana reduces the pain, it was ineffective.”   Ms. Madras sees parallels between the marketing of pot now and of opioids a few decades ago. “The benefits have been exaggerated, the risks have been minimized, and skeptics in the scientific community have been ignored,” she says. “The playbook is always to say it’s safe and effective and nonaddictive in people.”

As with alcohol, marijuana use, where legal, is a matter of Christian freedom.  But in exercising the freedom to use marijuana where legal, former Christianity Today executive editor, Andy Crouch, offers wise counsel: “The Christian’s freedom is a gift that leads to serving others, with care, attention, skill, and singleness of heart.  It’s a freedom that willingly sacrifices easy pleasures in order to serve.  And by that standard, it’s hard to imagine that pot will be helpful any time soon.”

Christian freedom, further, is always exercised within a cultural context where there is a community with values, practices and mores.  In North America, how does marijuana function?  Crouch writes correctly that “[Pot] is associated with superficially pleasant disengagement from the world.  It connotes a kind of indolence and ‘tuning out’ that is not an option for people who want to become agents of compassion and neighbor love, not to mention its association with all kinds of immaturity.”  In addition, one must consider that marijuana creates a temptation “to depend on substances to numb the pain of lives robbed of dignity and meaningful work.”

The marijuana plant is part of the world that our God created, and He has declared it to be good.  We have a stewardship responsibility before Him to be wise in how we utilize our role as creative cultivators with our God.  He is the sovereign; we are His dominion stewards.  As His image bearers, what we do and the choices we make must always foster a deeper relationship with Him.  As Paul declared, our freedom should lead to choices that are profitable, edifying and bring Him glory.  Crouch writes that “Image bearing invites us to deeper capacities and competence.  .  . Is marijuana a cultivated celebration of the created world, one that enhances and sharpens image bearing in all its dimensions?  Or does it merely substitute for the consolations and comforts of life lived truly and honestly before God and other people?”  For Christians who are free in Christ to make this choice, that choice seems obvious.

Furthermore, in a broader sense, it is time that government asks a related question when it comes to legitimizing marijuana:  “Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture?  What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage?  [David Brooks argues] that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship.  In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.”  Responsible freedom is not only a mark of mature Christianity; it is a mark of sensible government.

Legalizing widespread recreational use of marijuana is a panacea now gripping American culture.  Among other things, it is viewed as a proper expansion of human freedom to pursue the goals of the autonomous citizen.  However, I believe rather confidently that this expansion of freedom will actually enhance cultural decadence and dysfunction.  It is not advancement in the human condition.

See editorial in The Wall Street Journal (20-21 December 2025);  Allysia Finley, “What You Aren’t Hearing About Marijuana’s Health Effects” in the Wall Street Journal (10 May 2024); Jess Bidgood in the New York Times (7 May 2024); Alex Berenson in the New York Times (5 January 2019); Andy Crouch’s brief essay in Christianity Today (March 2014), p. 22; David Brooks in the New York Times (2 January 2014).