Stephen Eide joins Brian Anderson to discuss “Marijuana and the Mentally Ill” and other issues.
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Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Stephen Eide, he’s been on the show before. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a valued, contributing editor of City Journal. He writes extensively about social policy, especially in the areas of homelessness and mental illness. Today we’re going to focus on some of his recent writing, looking at mental health illness issues, including a terrific feature he wrote for our spring issue, “Marijuana and the Mentally Ill.”
Steve, thanks as always for joining us on 10 Blocks. In this essay, you’ve observed that the U.S. is conducting an ongoing pot legalization experiment. This is a topic City Journal has covered for many years, including work by Steve Malanga, Charles Lehman, yourself, and others. Steve recently wrote a big essay, Steve Malanga, for us, noting that legal pot’s promises striking a blow for social justice by ending the war on drugs, igniting economic growth, being medically harmless. All these have proven false, so the claim about medical harmlessness, particularly regarding mental health seems especially dubious. So I wonder, what do we know to start off about pot’s effects on mental health, both its role in causing or contributing to mental illness and the real subject of your essay, which is its impact on those who are already struggling with mental health challenges?…