break.... Cannabis regulatory policy and a note on DSM-5

Irwin and Sen. Sheldon Neeley, D-Flint, are working on a package of bills that would automatically erase criminal records of those convicted of certain marijuana-related crimes and help streamline the expungement process for the thousands who are working to move beyond missteps of the past.

“This is for anyone convicted of a non-violent marijuana crime,” Neeley explained. “These people will no longer have an albatross or a shadow of a criminal record. Right now, we’re asking people to carry around the burden of criminal convictions for things that are now legal. That’s not fair at all. We have an obligation to remedy this.”

Link to article on Michigan, New Jersey, other states.

Let’s consider DSM-5 implications for jurisdictions with and without these approaches to cannabis policy liberalization.

To eliminate policy-variation as a source of distortion in comparisons of individuals (and population groups), the DSM-5 drug use disorders task force wisely dropped ‘legal problems’ from the set of diagnostic criteria, but retained ‘social consequences’ without considering that many serious social consequences are downstream from the arrest or conviction.

Get arrested, and by itself, family and school responses kick in.

Get convicted, even more.

Research project awaits. Re-program the diagnostic algorithm with two switches: one switch focused on individual-level responses such as giving up other reinforcing activities (e.g., reading novels) once cannabis use occupies a larger fraction of the individual’s behavioral repertoire; the other switch lets the social consequences rip.

Without consideration of these two switches, do not expect definitive evidence from current projects to assess effect of policy on transitions from cannabis use onset to cannabis use disorder onset, andbe wary of CUD prevalence comparisons across jurisdictions.