The dispensary on Main Street in a town I know sells a 15%-THC vape cartridge shaped like a fruit gummy. The movement that promised to be the party of family, community, and ordered liberty spent two decades legalizing a psychoactive drug industry that feeds on the developing brains of the young people it claimed to protect, and now that the addiction wards are full and the psychosis numbers are climbing, it wants credit for noticing. Allysia Finley’s interview with Kevin Sabet in the Wall Street Journal (“Kevin Sabet: Has Legal Marijuana Passed Its High Point?”, July 17) catalogs the wreckage with an honesty the movement has not shown itself before. Sabet has been making this case for twenty years. He is right that the research on adolescent psychosis and addiction is damning, that the industry sold promises it never kept, and that the alcohol analogy is false.
But the Wall Street Journal did not run this interview in 2012, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use. It did not run it in 2014, when the New York Times was crusading for full legalization and the conservative movement’s libertarian wing was cheering the expansion of “freedom.” It ran it now, when the damage is visible in every emergency-room dashboard and every school-counselor’s caseload, and the reader is meant to feel that someone on the right was paying attention all along.
I used to trade agricultural futures in Chicago. I know the rentier machine from the inside: you take a real thing—grain a farmer grew with his hands—turn it into an abstraction on a screen, extract value from the spread, and let the producer absorb the cost. The marijuana industry runs the same machine on different fuel. It sells a product that at the potencies now standard can trigger psychosis in a teenager, and it externalizes every consequence—the emergency visit, the shattered family, the young person who never quite comes back—onto the community that trusted the “local control” pitch. The industry pockets the profit. The town buries the cost.
This is the pattern of the fusionist coalition on every commodified vice. The party of “freedom” legalized the dispensary license sold in 2016, the school counselor whose caseload of teenagers with cannabis-related issues doubled in three years, and then acted surprised at the addiction rates. The party of “local control” let private equity buy the nursing home and then acted surprised at the death rates. The party of “the market” deregulated the opioid supply chain and then acted surprised at the overdose rates. And the party of “states’ rights” handed the psychoactive drug industry a license to operate on Main Street and now acts surprised that the psychosis numbers are climbing. The mechanism is the same every time: an industry with no stake in the community extracts value from a rooted place, and the movement that was supposed to defend that place calls it freedom.
The Grammar Test is what separates a conservative indictment from a liberal one. The left says: the industry exploits the vulnerable, corporate capture perverted reform, the drug war was racist. Those complaints are real, but they are not mine. My complaint is that the conservative movement—the movement that was supposed to be the party of family, of community, of ordered liberty, of the mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the concentrated power of capital—instead delivered a predatory industry that dissolves every one of those things. The “freedom” it championed was not ordered liberty but the freedom of a drug company to market a potent psychoactive substance to adolescents. The “local control” it defended was the absence of any control at all, because the industry wrote the regulations and the tax revenue was too tempting to refuse.
The deepest wound is to the mediating institutions. The family that discovers its teenager is smoking high-potency cannabis every day has no institutional backup—the school is afraid to intervene, the church has been told the drug is harmless, the local paper that might have covered the addiction crisis has been gutted by the same hedge fund that owns a stake in the industry. The parish that wants to run a recovery ministry finds that the only treatment beds available are a hundred miles away and cost more than most families in Adams County make in a month. The town that decides it does not want a dispensary on Main Street discovers the industry has already bought the ballot measure.
But that would require a conservatism that actually conserves. The movement that called every assault on community “freedom” and every predatory industry “the market” and every abdication of responsibility “states’ rights” does not get to wake up twenty years later and claim the moral authority. It sold the towns. It cashed the tax revenue. The dispensary is open. The addiction is real. And the party of ordered liberty has no one to blame for the hangover but itself.
What does a genuinely conservative response look like? Not the drug war as waged—mass incarceration, federal overreach, the no-knock raid that cost a father his home, the mandatory minimum that cost a young man his twenties, an enforcement apparatus that crushed the vulnerable while the comfortable got high with impunity. That was the managerial state, not conservatism. And not the libertarian free-for-all that treats a brain-altering substance as just another consumer good. The rooted answer starts from the principle of subsidiarity: equip the family to recognize the danger before the addiction sets in. Give the parish and the mutual aid society the resources to run recovery ministries that answer to the community, not to a for-profit chain in another state. Let the town council that does not want a dispensary on its Main Street keep it out—real local option, the kind the industry cannot preempt with a check. Build treatment where it belongs: in the cooperative, the credit union, the member-owned clinic that answers to the people it serves. The parish hall where the recovery ministry meets every Tuesday. The credit union that financed the halfway house. The town that in 2024 voted the dispensary off its Main Street.