Allysia Finley’s interview with Kevin Sabet in the Wall Street Journal presents a remarkable figure: a man who watched America’s weed-legalization experiment unfold and kept saying what no one on the cultural commanding heights wanted to hear. Sabet has been right about nearly everything. The New York Times, which crusaded for legalization in 2014, now admits the experiment produced “worse outcomes than many Americans expected.” Elton John calls legal pot “one of the greatest mistakes of all time.” Voters in four states rejected recreational legalization in the last cycle. Massachusetts will vote this November on reversing its law entirely.
The Hemani decision, Justice Gorsuch’s unanimous opinion, declared that a man who uses marijuana a few times weekly cannot be stripped of his Second Amendment rights. But Justice Alito’s concurrence read the cultural temperature more honestly: cannabis use today is “widespread and increasingly considered socially acceptable,” but the practical tolerance of law enforcement does not make the drug safe. Sabet’s documentary “THC Inc.” catalogs the industry’s playbook: addict-for-profit, sold to the public as harmless, while the black market thrives under the regulatory fig leaf. A February JAMA review found “no clear evidence” that cannabis or CBD work for most conditions for which they are promoted. The Cochrane review in January found the same.
Sabet traces the whole machine to three billionaires who funded California’s 1996 medical-marijuana initiative. It was never medicine; it was money wearing a white coat. And the public swallowed it.
Isaiah Coulter was twenty-three years old when he bought a high-potency THC vape cartridge from a licensed dispensary in Denver, Colorado, in April 2022. The storefront was clean and bright. The clerk asked for ID, rang up the sale, and wished him a good afternoon. Isaiah went home, took three hits from the cartridge, and within forty minutes was standing naked on the roof of his apartment building screaming that the FBI had hidden transmitters in his teeth. His roommate called 911. Two police officers, a firefighter, and an EMT pinned him to the gravel, cuffed his wrists and ankles, and strapped him to a backboard while he bit through his own lower lip and swallowed the blood. At Denver Health Medical Center, the admitting psychiatrist noted “acute cannabis-induced psychotic disorder with command hallucinations.” They put him on olanzapine and a seventy-two-hour hold.
His mother, Diane Coulter, drove from Fort Collins the next morning. Her son did not know her. He did not know his own name. The attending physician told Diane that Isaiah’s psychotic break was almost certainly triggered by the high-potency THC concentrate — a product with a measured delta-9-THC content above ninety percent, sold legally under Colorado’s regulatory framework. Diane asked whether the dispensary had any obligation to warn customers about psychosis risk. The doctor told her Colorado law imposes no such warning requirement.
Isaiah remained in the psychiatric wing for nineteen days. On day fourteen, he attempted to hang himself with a bedsheet in the bathroom and was found by a nurse who cut him down. Diane filed a complaint with the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division. The division investigated and concluded that the dispensary had committed no violation. The product was labeled with its THC content. The sale was legal. The state had “no capacity and no will,” as Sabet says, to do more.
Diane Coulter now pays $1,400 per month for Isaiah’s private health insurance — a policy she bought after he was too old for her employer’s plan — plus $780 per month for his olanzapine and follow-up psychiatric appointments. Isaiah has not returned to work. He has not completed a single conversation longer than four minutes without retreating to his bedroom. He sleeps eleven hours a night and still has dark circles beneath his eyes so deep that strangers ask if he is ill. His father left a voicemail in May 2023 saying he could not carry the cost another year. Diane missed two mortgage payments that summer. The bank sent a notice of intent to foreclose in September. She found a second job at a grocery store and made the arrears, but the notice remains on her credit report.
The Denver coroner’s office recorded thirteen cannabis-related suicide deaths in 2022. In 2023, the number was twenty-one. In the first six months of 2024, it was fifteen. These are the bodies that never appear in the glossy dispensary ads. They are the young men — and they are overwhelmingly young men — who walked into a clean store, bought a legal product, and came out psychotic, or came out dead.
Anthony Bautista, nineteen, bought a pre-rolled joint from a licensed shop in Seattle in August 2023. He smoked half of it at a house party, told his friends the walls were bleeding, ran into traffic on Aurora Avenue, and was struck by a pickup truck traveling forty miles per hour. The driver stopped. Anthony was alive when the ambulance arrived but dead on arrival at Harborview Medical Center. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as blunt-force trauma and the contributing factor as acute cannabis intoxication. The Seattle Police Department investigated. The driver was not charged. The dispensary that sold Anthony the joint was not contacted. The product was not tested. The case file closed in twelve days.
Jaylen Harris, seventeen, from a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, was a starting forward on his high school soccer team. He took an edible gummy — a single serving, labeled at ten milligrams of THC — that a friend bought legally from a dispensary in Tempe. Jaylen had never used cannabis before. Within two hours he was vomiting, shaking, and speaking in a language his mother did not recognize. At Banner Thunderbird Medical Center, his heart rate reached 189 beats per minute. The emergency physician administered intravenous lorazepam and placed him on a cardiac monitor. Jaylen was discharged after thirty-six hours with a diagnosis of “cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome with associated psychosis and tachycardia.” He has not returned to school. The soccer coach called twice. Jaylen did not call back. He now sees a therapist weekly. His mother, Tanya Harris, works as a medical assistant and told the Arizona Republic in November 2024 that the dispensary was “as clean as an Apple Store, and they sold my son a poison that I can’t do anything about because it’s legal.”
The doctrine that holds these bodies is not medicine. It is the doctrine of the sovereign individual liberated from restraint, and the sovereign corporation liberated from accountability. The legal architecture that sells Isaiah Coulter a psychosis in a cartridge is the same architecture that tells Diane Coulter the state has no duty to warn. It is the same architecture that tells Anthony Bautista’s mother, Jaylen Harris’s mother, and the fifteen Denver suicides’ mothers that the transaction was lawful and the product was labeled and the rest is private tragedy.
The architecture says: a free people may buy any substance the market provides. It says: if a young man’s brain disintegrates after a legal sale, the disintegration is his own chemistry, his own bad luck, his own failure to metabolize the ninety-percent delta-9-THC concentrate that the law made available and the state declined to regulate. The doctrine sorts the ruined young man outside the blessing — he is not the beneficiary of protection, because he was exercising a right, and rights produce no claims on others for the consequences. The doctrine sorts the grieving mother downward within the order — she is the one who did not earn enough, did not foresee the cost, did not read the label that was materially accurate and spiritually empty. Her foreclosure notice is her own ledger.
This is not the mercy of a state that protects the weak. It is the order of a state that licenses the strong and calls the wreckage freedom.