Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

Stephen Eyde. He's been on the show before. He's 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 terrific feature he wrote for a 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, well, these have proven false. So the claim about medical harmlessness,

particularly regarding mental health, seems especially dubious. So I wonder, you know,

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? Yeah, well, the question of whether

marijuana causes mental illness is an old question. I mean, it goes back over a century that people

have been debating that question. It's an important question and people should continue to

debate it, in part because there's a fairly substantial body of evidence that's been around for

a while that strongly suggests that marijuana use may cause the development of serious mental illness.

But also, you're someone who just doesn't want to believe that or disbelieves of particular

studies. We have to revisit that question every so often because habits of marijuana use change

...