As the pendulum of public opinion swings towards legalizing weed, there is a potential for it to swing too far.

Legalization will fundamentally alter the way people interact with and use marijuana. (Michael W. Benurtzer, Wikimedia Commons)

Strong pro-marijuana advocacy and a tolerant youth culture have normalized consumption of the drug and now, for the first time, a majority of Americans favor legalization. However we must consider all the effects of legalizing the production and distribution of weed before automatically agreeing with the crowd. Along with some very visible benefits, the commercialization of weed could have some very negative consequences that must be addressed.

Bringing weed into the fold of legal psychotropic drugs, along with substances such as alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, will fundamentally alter the way that people interact with and use it. Once legalized, weed will almost certainly attain a similar status to that of alcohol. Sold to those of legal age, it will be regulated and heavily taxed by the government.  As with alcohol, the government will then have a vested interest in its continued distribution and sale in order to maintain the influx of revenue that it will provide. This means that intensive advertising will likely be permitted, leading to the commercialization of the drug and commodification of the culture around it in order to have more mass appeal.

Advertising agencies do not try to promote the consumer’s well being; their job requires them to use all means available to convince people to purchase their product. Just walk around any major city and you will see billboards telling you how drinking will make you cooler and more likeable. I doubt advertisers would have much trouble figuring out ways to make smoking weed seem like a necessary component to enjoy life and have fun. This will do enormous damage to the current culture surrounding the drug, which is currently much more personal than corporate.

While legalization would reduce drug trafficking in states where it is currently illegal, it would also break the chains between producers and consumers in states like California, where it is possible to trace the path of medical marijuana from the consumer to the farmer who grew it in just a couple of steps. In place of the relatively small growing operations; massive factory farms would likely emerge in order to streamline production and the many people currently involved in growing medical marijuana in accordance with their state laws will quite possibly be forced out of the market altogether.

As manufacturers and consumers grew more distant, feelings of personal responsibility to customers would begin to lose importance in comparison with making money. Use of pesticides would probably increase in order to protect the large areas of monoculture, which would drive up the price of less treated weed, creating a class divide for weed consumption much like what has happened to the health food industry over the past couple of decades. The market might even become large enough to warrant development of genetically modified weed in order to increase pest resistance, potency and output, introducing a whole other source of potential ethical issues.

There would of course, be advantages to legalization. The end of long incarcerations for non-violent drug related crimes would be a huge gain. Yet, currently, less than 50,000 of America's 1.6 million prisoners are serving time for marijuana-related offenses. Thus, arguments that legalization would solve the country’s prison problem are simply false.  Furthermore, decriminalization could achieve the exact same results for the prison system by making the use or distribution of weed merely a civil infraction rather than a crime deserving of jail time.

If weed could be legalized but not turned into yet another item for America's consumer culture to indulge in, then legalization could be a good idea. However I believe that it will simply homogenize yet another part of American society—one which has, so far, had a history of representing counter culture and freedom of expression—and boxing it into a narrow hypothesis of what it means to get high. This would be a sad fate for marijuana.

Reach Contributor F. Jaspar Abu-Jaber here.