30 Years of Legal Weed: Has It Made Us Any Healthier?

5 min readEARLIER THIS YEAR, during a brief and mercifully abandoned period when I was considering doing stand-up as a hobby, I went to a comedy show in downtown Austin. I was legitimately shocked to find, as part of the two-drink minimum bill of fare, the option for several different flavors of $5 THC seltzers. This wasn’t “take a pull off your vape or smoke a roach in the alley before the show” territory. No, marijuana drinks were on the menu.In the past few years, my only social activities have been poker, competitive trivia, and going to the movies, all activities people do stoned, but not activities where you can literally order drugs from the bar alongside your chicken wings. The comedy club, on the other hand, considered marijuana products as a profit center.This was one of those lightly attended weeknight shows where the comedians banter with the audience because they haven’t prepared much material. So, during a Q&A, I brought up the fact that there were THC sodas available to order, in laminate. “Sir, this is 2026,” the host said.This is where we are now, a full three decades after California legalized medical weed. But is that good for us?As I write this, it’s been eight-and-a-half years since I quit marijuana, a drug that at one point made pretty much anything—listening to music, shopping for groceries, cleaning the house—fun for me.But really, I’ve been sober since I stopped using THC, since I was hardly just smoking there at the end. I was vaping, eating, drinking, dabbing, and otherwise gorging myself on what has become an extremely potent, psychosis-inducing drug. And I wasn’t having fun.My breaking point, which I recounted in my 2020 memoir Pothead, came at Game 2 of the 2017 World Series at Dodger Stadium, where I was so wasted on weed that I had a screaming meltdown in front of security when I found out the ticket I’d bought was fraudulent.It was a low point, a bottom so deep and so pathetic that I should have quit right there. But I went on for another three weeks before I finally crawled to a Marijuana Anonymous meeting and asked for help.Now, nearly a decade later, I’ve emerged from my cocoon to find that THC is everywhere. I live in a state where it’s still technically illegal, but you can find some sort of THC variant in most convenience stores and in most bars and nightclubs.My friend is an attorney who represents the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. He says his client is in a near panic. Sales are down for every beverage except for nonalcoholic mixers and those THC seltzers. THC is the beer, wine, and vodka of the present day, combined.And so we find ourselves in a bizarre situation where people are drinking way less alcohol because it’s unhealthy for you, but they are instead ingesting THC products—either through soda, gummies, or any number of other concoctions—from unknown manufacturers, with unknown formulas and malleable dosages.They’re also vaping, which emerging research is showing is kind of awful for our lungs. A University of Michigan study recently showed that teens who vaped cannabis were twice as likely to experience respiratory symptoms like “wheezing or whistling” in the chest than those who vaped nicotine or smoked traditional cigarettes.Unlike traditional marijuana, this stuff isn’t “from the earth.” Who knows where it’s really from—or where it’s going?When I quit weed in 2017, and somewhat loudly and publicly announced myself as an addict, I got the requisite amount of sympathy, but also a tremendous amount of pushback. Marijuana isn’t dangerous, people said. It isn’t addictive. It’s actually good for you.In 2016, Gavin Newsom, then California’s lieutenant governor, spearheaded the legalization push for recreational marijuana. Cannabis sales have produced more than $8 billion in tax revenue for California since retail sales began in 2018, with a decent proportion of that funneled into teen substance-abuse prevention programs. But the state has also seen an increase in children suffering from cannabis poisoning.It’s been a massive shift, moving from medically administered weed for veterans and cancer patients to powerful THC beverages you can buy at your bodega.Legalization has created a new frontier of intoxicants without a centralized warning system for users. Data from a 2025 national study of U.S. adults stated that 15 percent of respondents reported daily or near-daily cannabis use.Among those daily users, 18 percent reported experiencing symptoms consistent with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a disorder characterized by cyclic, severe nausea, intractable vomiting, and gut pain alleviated temporarily by hot baths or showers.This translates to an estimated 7.2 million people in the United States alone, many of them teenagers, experiencing these symptoms. That number is probably vastly underestimated, given that fewer than 12 percent of sufferers have received a formal diagnosis.Welcome to the darker side of legalized weed, a world of cannabis-induced psychosis, “scromiting” (yes, screaming while vomiting), and concoctions like “shatter” or “wax,” which contain up to 90 percent THC, as opposed to the 3 to 5 percent in joints from previous decades.So I find myself in a somewhat odd situation. I was a relatively early victim of modern weed’s potency, as well as a relatively early unadopter, and a very early voice in the wilderness warning the world that marijuana might not be the answer to all our health concerns. But now I find myself, like a patient waking up from a long coma, in a world where THC is as prevalent as, and cheaper than, whiskey. Yet still, I find myself thinking it should be legal. So which is it? Maybe we still don’t have enough data.Thirty years since the start of legalization might feel like a long time, but it’s really not. In terms of scientific analysis, we’re still in relatively undiscovered country. If you’re suffering from chronic pain, or dying of cancer, marijuana is a healthier option than, say, oxycodone. But for the rest of us? No one really knows.The only thing I can be truly sure of is that it’s no longer for me.More Weed, at 30‘Scromiting’ and Other Super Scary Symptoms of Taking High-THC WeedThis Is Your Brain on Weed. It’s Actually Kind of Amazing.People Think They Drive Better High. These Scientists Are Testing the Theory.This Is What Weed Really Did to My BodyWeed Addiction Is a Real Thing. The World's Leading Cannabis Researcher Explains Why.