Jessica McBride and Jim Piwowarczyk noted in a Wisconsin Right Now piece they ran Monday that Jeremiah Mosteller, a Badger Institute visiting fellow working on our “real facts” policy briefs, is personally in favor of marijuana legalization.
That much is true.
Mosteller is a policy director at Americans for Prosperity, a national public policy organization. It’s supported by Charles Koch, who, as McBride and Piwowarczyk wrote, publicly favors marijuana legalization.
AFP, too, favors legalization and is in the Cannabis Freedom Alliance, a coalition founded in part by Weldon Angelos, who was convicted of selling marijuana — and pardoned for it by President Trump. The coalition includes other pro-legalization center-right organizations with a diversity of perspectives.
Conservatives who pay attention know none of this is a secret.
Here’s part of what McBride and Piwowarczyk got wrong: They stated in their story that the Badger Institute should have hired a researcher with a “countering” agenda that would present a fuller picture.
In fact, although he doesn’t have an agenda per se, we did hire a researcher with personal opinions that run counter to Mosteller’s. In fact, he is our full-time policy director, Patrick McIlheran. McIlheran is himself avowedly skeptical of legalization and describes himself as paleoconservative. He has spent many months working on much of our yet-to-be published marijuana research, some of which will have his name on it.
In the meantime, McIlheran also has editing oversight over the entire project, including absolutely everything Mosteller has written. The result is a factual and neutral approach that we can always add to if one side or the other wants to weigh in.
Wisconsin Right Now, among other things, notes that it hasn’t seen a paper from Badger Institute about the psychosis-linked effects of using cannabis. That’s true — because the paper on health effects, written by McIlheran, is still underway. It is a large and complex topic with a great deal of research, as are others we will write about. Getting those details right is crucial to providing credible answers to Wisconsinites.
My desire to have two individuals with unimpeachable backgrounds in law and journalism — and different viewpoints on legalization as well as the humility to be open to new facts — has been quite intentional and mirrors conservative thought in general. According to the latest Gallup poll in the fall of 2023, 55% of Republicans, 52% of conservatives and 70% of independents favor legalization in America.
Between the two poles of the libertarian Koch and the populist Trump, one finds a large tent enclosing most of the broad conservative movement in the United States and including differing opinions on legalization. All you need to do is look no further than how neighboring red states have approached the issue. For example, Montana allows adult use, both Dakotas allow medical use, and Idaho still maintains complete prohibition. It is unclear how being somewhere on that spectrum disqualified Mosteller to work on a project for a conservative think tank in Wisconsin — any more than it disqualifies McIlheran.
Mosteller was selected to be a part of this research project — alongside others who share diverse views on the policy — because of his expertise in public safety policy and his work with conservatives across the country to shape state and federal marijuana policies that respect conservative principles like low taxes, free markets, competition, federalism and the rule of law.
Mosteller and McIlheran, for what it’s worth, are both paid with general operating funds. There is no specific donor funding either of them. None of the money for anything Mosteller or McIlheran does here has ever come from AFP or Charles Koch or the Cannabis Freedom Alliance that Mosteller has been a part of.
Perhaps the most important fact overlooked by McBride and Piwowarczyk is that Mosteller’s work is simply a compilation of other researchers’ peer-reviewed research and is best described thus far as an accounting of tradeoffs. The result is clear to anyone reading the pieces, which have noted and footnoted research that shows what some will think beneficial impacts — and also noted a sharp increase in traffic mayhem, localized increases in crime around dispensaries, and increased adult use of a drug as consequences of legalization, among other costs. Mosteller’s papers are not polishing the apple.
Please read all of them for yourself, read the footnotes, look at the studies (warning, there are a lot of them) and make up your own mind. We’re not perfect. If you come upon other studies that we’ve missed, please tell us. If you think we emphasize some studies over others that are more important, please tell us that as well.
To that end, Wisconsin Right Now pointed out an article in the Chicago Tribune that referenced a study that had found the rate of fatal crash drivers who tested positive for marijuana rose from 25% to 37% in the two years after legalization.
The study referenced in the Chicago Tribune piece is a report published by the Illinois Adult Use Cannabis Health Advisory Committee that serves as the state’s annual evaluation of the implementation of legalization. We did not include this finding in the report we published because — as we noted on the first page — we “have considered only research that is academic, peer-reviewed, and original.”
At the same time, we’ve noted repeatedly that research shows legalization for adult recreational use, or simply decriminalizing it, will likely result in increased traffic crashes and deaths. It’s good to know their finding is in keeping with ours.
We are seeking discussion and dialogue — which is why I was so upset, frankly, that Wisconsin Right Now sent me an email at 1:43 Monday afternoon with a 2:30 deadline and then, before I ever saw their questions because I was in a meeting that entire time, posted their story.
There are other assertions and statements in the piece that Wisconsin Right Now’s readers deserve an answer to. Just contact us.
In the meantime, if we wanted to advocate or lobby for a particular change, if we’d already come to a conclusion, we’d simply say so — as we often do.
We never shy away from advocating directly for a legislative outcome if we have done the research and believe it is the best thing for the state. In this instance, there is not enough evidence yet for us to take a stance.
If we do, we will be upfront about it as we always are.
Mike Nichols is President of the Badger Institute.
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