Elon Musk may be in trouble, but it has nothing to do with the relatively young CEO taking a puff of marijuana on camera, as many have been led to believe. Tesla’s stocks tumbled 6 percent Friday, coincidentally after Musk took a singular toke of weed, but if the stock’s decline was related to his one puff rather than the deeper problems plaguing one of his companies and the man himself, that would have been because many in the media deeply mischaracterized the act and the use of marijuana.
The Fox affiliate in Denver — arguably the nation’s marijuana capital — for instance, ran “Tesla stock falls as CEO Elon Musk appears to smoke marijuana on video,” while The San Francisco Chronicle went with the typically pun “Tesla stock take a hit after Elon Musk appears to smoke weed.” On CNBC Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management dubbed this marijuana moment “reckless” before declaring all of Tesla’s board “negligent.”
And over on CNN an anchor declared, “Mr. Musk seems to be kind of high,” before portraying the Musk interview as a raucous frat party: “He was also throwing about a flamethrower — a samurai sword also came into this.”
But the frenzied reactions to Musk’s interview highlight a bigger problem plaguing the nation: Many of the nation’s premiere news outlets, pundits, academics, politicians and senior government officials remain willfully ignorant about marijuana.
Ignorance may be bliss inside one’s home, but when the nation’s elites share their uninformed assumptions or outright anti-pot bias with millions of people, it crosses a line. So, first some facts about marijuana.
Musk’s hitting some weed was nothing novel. It’s actually quite normal for millions of Americans. And the interview was filmed in California — one of the nine states where marijuana is as legal to consume as a Budweiser. Some 61 percent of the American public now agree that marijuana should be legalized, according to the Pew Research Center. In 30 states and Washington, D.C., marijuana is legal for medicinal use, and the Marijuana Policy Project estimates that there are 2.25 million people who use it on a prescription basis.
And though federal marijuana policy has long limited researchers’ ability to study cannabis’ effects in controlled clinical trials, the list of medical benefits is long and it’s generally accepted that even its worst potential side effects (few of which would happen with one toke) don’t compare with the ravages excessive alcohol use has left on society, including the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually.
I don’t have to rely on the data alone, though: I use marijuana regularly to relieve chronic pain and while, professionally, I’m not comparable to Elon Musk, marijuana doesn’t impede my functionality. Like countless millions of my fellow citizens, especially the nation’s veterans, it actually helps me function.
