Julie
Beck

theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-new-age-of-astrology/550034/

Astrology is a meme, and it’s spreading in that blooming, unfurling way that memes do. On
social media, astrologers and astrology meme machines amass tens or hundreds of
thousands of followers, people joke about Mercury retrograde, and categorize “the signs as
…” literally anything: cat breeds, Oscar Wilde quotes, Stranger Things characters, types of
french fries. In online publications, daily, weekly, and monthly horoscopes, and zodiac-
themed listicles flourish.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

This isn’t the first moment astrology’s had and it won’t be the last. The practice has been
around in various forms for thousands of years. More recently, the New Age movement of
the 1960s and ’70s came with a heaping helping of the zodiac. (Some also refer to the New
Age as the “Age of Aquarius”—the 2,000-year period after the Earth is said to move into the
Aquarius sign.)

1/9

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-new-age-of-astrology/550034/

http://astrorhea.tumblr.com/post/168195115455/the-signs-as-stranger-things-characters

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/59wz75/daily-horoscope-december-18-2017

https://www.thecut.com/2017/12/madame-clairevoyant-horoscopes-for-the-week-of-december-18.html

http://www.elle.com/horoscopes/monthly/

http://www.refinery29.com/2017/12/185005/tv-characters-zodiac-signs

https://www.buzzfeed.com/delaneystrunk/why-the-hell-are-pisces-so-sensitive-like-just-chil?utm_term=.rrwlzPXRP#.gryyqNngN

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/audio-articles/?utm_source=audioarticleembed

https://goo.gl/5sVYXm

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/

Tweets by julieebeck

In the decades between the New Age boom and now, while astrology certainly didn’t go
away—you could still regularly find horoscopes in the back pages of magazines—it “went
back to being a little bit more in the background,” says Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based
in Los Angeles. “Then there’s something that’s happened in the last five years that’s given it
an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years.
Millennials have taken it and run with it.”

Many people I spoke to for this piece said they had a sense that the stigma attached to
astrology, while it still exists, had receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online
culture, especially for young people.

“Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much
geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient,” says Lucie Greene, the worldwide
director of J. Walter Thompson’s innovation group, which tracks and predicts cultural trends.

Callie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly, says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown
really exponentially.” Stella Bugbee, the president and editor-in-chief of The Cut, says a
typical horoscope post on the site got 150 percent more traffic in 2017 than the year before.

In some ways, astrology is perfectly suited for the internet age. There’s a low barrier to
entry, and nearly endless depths to plumb if you feel like falling down a Google research
hole. The availability of more in-depth information online has given this cultural wave of
astrology a certain erudition—more jokes about Saturn returns, fewer “Hey baby, what’s
your sign?” pickup lines.

A quick primer: Astrology is not a science; there’s no evidence that one’s zodiac sign actually
correlates to personality. But the system has its own sort of logic. Astrology ascribes
meaning to the placement of the sun, the moon, and the planets within 12 sections of the
sky—the signs of the zodiac. You likely know your sun sign, the most famous zodiac sign,
even if you’re not an astrology buff. It’s based on where the sun was on your birthday. But
the placement of the moon and each of the other planets at the time and location of your
birth adds additional shades to the picture of you painted by your “birth chart.”

What horoscopes are supposed to do is give you information about what the planets are
doing right now, and in the future, and how all that affects each sign. “Think of the planets
as a cocktail party,” explains Susan Miller, the popular astrologer who founded the Astrology
Zone website. “You might have three people talking together, two may be over in the corner
arguing, Venus and Mars may be kissing each other. I have to make sense of those
conversations that are happening each month for you.”

“Astrologers are always trying to boil down these giant concepts into digestible pieces of
knowledge,” says Nicholas. “The kids these days and their memes are like the perfect
context for astrology.”

2/9

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232348477_An_empirical_test_of_the_astrological_theory_of_personality

Astrology expresses complex ideas about personality, life cycles, and relationship patterns
through the shorthand of the planets and zodiac symbols. And that shorthand works well
online, where symbols and shorthand are often baked into communication.

“Let me state first that I consider astrology a cultural or psychological phenomenon,” not a
scientific one, Bertram Malle, a social cognitive scientist at Brown University, told me in an
email. But “full-fledged astrology”—that goes beyond newspaper-style sun-sign horoscopes
—“provides a powerful vocabulary to capture not only personality and temperament but
also life’s challenges and opportunities. To the extent that one simply learns this vocabulary,
it may be appealing as a rich way of representing (not explaining or predicting) human
experiences and life events, and identifying some possible paths of coping.”

People tend to turn to astrology in times of stress. A small 1982 study by the psychologist
Graham Tyson found that “people who consult astrologers” did so in response to stressors
in their lives—particularly stress “linked to the individual’s social roles and to his or her
relationships,” Tyson wrote. “Under conditions of high stress, the individual is prepared to
use astrology as a coping device even though under low-stress conditions he does not
believe in it.”

According to American Psychological Association survey data, since 2014, Millennials have
been the most stressed generation, and also the generation most likely to say their stress
has increased in the past year since 2010. Millennials and Gen Xers have been significantly
more stressed than older generations since 2012. And Americans as a whole have seen
increased stress because of the political tumult since the 2016 presidential election. The
2017 edition of the APA’s survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they were
significantly stressed about their country’s future. Fifty-six percent of people said reading
the news stresses them out, and Millennials and Gen Xers were significantly more likely than
older people to say so. Lately that news often deals with political infighting, climate change,
global crises, and the threat of nuclear war. If stress makes astrology look shinier, it’s not
surprising that more seem to be drawn to it now.

Nicholas’s horoscopes are evidence of this. She has around 1 million monthly readers
online, and recently snagged a book deal—one of four new mainstream astrology
guidebooks sold in a two-month period in summer 2017, according to Publisher’s
Marketplace. Anna Paustenbach, Nicholas’s editor at HarperOne, told me in an email that
Nicholas is “at the helm of a resurgence of astrology.” She thinks this is partly because
Nicholas’s horoscopes are explicitly political. On September 6, the day after the Trump
administration announced it was rescinding DACA—the deferred-action protection program
for undocumented immigrants—Nicholas sent out her typical newsletter for the upcoming
full moon. It read, in part:

3/9

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886982900265

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2017/state-nation

http://mailchi.mp/chaninicholas/new-moon-in-taurus-affirmation-horoscopes-for-the-week-of-april-24th-906569?e=b22fdcb5ab

The full moon in Pisces … may open the floodgates of our feelings. May help us to empathize
with others … May we use this full moon to continue to dream up, and actively work toward,
creating a world where white supremacy has been abolished.

Astrology offers those in crisis the comfort of imagining a better future, a tangible reminder
of that clichéd truism that is nonetheless hard to remember when you’re in the thick of it:
This too shall pass.

In 2013, when Sandhya was 32 years old, she downloaded the Astrology Zone app, looking
for a road map. She felt lonely, and unappreciated at her nonprofit job in Washington, D.C.,
and she was going out drinking four or five times a week. “I was in the cycle of constantly
being out, trying to escape,” she says.

She wanted to know when things would get better and Astrology Zone had an answer.
Jupiter, “the planet of good fortune,” would move into Sandhya’s zodiac sign, Leo, in one
year’s time, and remain there for a year. Sandhya remembers reading that if she cut clutter
out of her life now, she’d reap the rewards when Jupiter arrived.

So Sandhya spent the next year making room for Jupiter. (She requested that we not publish
her last name because she works as an attorney and doesn’t want her clients to know the
details of her personal life.) She started staying home more often, cooking for herself,
applying for jobs, and going on more dates. “I definitely distanced myself from two or three
friends who I didn’t feel had good energy when I hung around them,” she says. “And that
helped significantly.”

Jupiter entered Leo on July 16, 2014. That same July, Sandhya was offered a new job. That
December, Sandhya met the man she would go on to marry. “My life changed dramatically,”
she says. “Part of it is that a belief in something makes it happen. But I followed what the
app was saying. So I credit some of it to this Jupiter belief.”

Humans are narrative creatures, constantly explaining their lives and selves by weaving
together the past, present, and future (in the form of goals and expectations). Monisha
Pasupathi, a developmental psychologist who studies narrative at the University of Utah,
says that while she lends no credence to astrology, it “provides [people] a very clear frame
for that explanation.”

It does give one a pleasing orderly sort of feeling, not unlike alphabetizing a library, to take
life’s random events and emotions and slot them into helpfully labeled shelves. This guy
isn’t texting me back because Mercury retrograde probably kept him from getting the
message. I take such a long time to make decisions because my Mars is in Taurus. My boss
will finally recognize all my hard work when Jupiter enters my tenth house. A combination of
stress and uncertainty about the future is an ailment for which astrology can seem like the
perfect balm.

4/9

Jupiter

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/life-stories-narrative-psychology-redemption-mental-health/400796/

Sandhya says she turns to astrology looking for help in times of despair, “when I’m like
‘Someone tell me the future is gonna be okay.’” Reading her horoscope was like flipping
ahead in her own story.

“I’m always a worrier,” she says. “I’m one of those people who, once I start getting into a
book, I skip ahead and I read the end. I don’t like cliffhangers, I don’t like suspense. I just
need to know what’s gonna happen. I have a story in my head. I was just hoping certain
things would happen in my life, and I wanted to see if I am lucky enough for them to
happen.”

Now that they have happened, “I haven’t been reading [my horoscope] as much,” she says,
“and I think it’s because I’m in a happy place right now.”

Maura Dwyer

For some, astrology’s predictions function like Dumbo’s feather—a comforting magic to hold
onto until you realize you could fly on your own all along. But it’s the ineffable mystical
sparkle of the feather—gentler and less draining than the glow of a screen—that makes
people reach for it in the first place.

People are starting to get sick of a life lived so intensely on the grid. They wish for more
anonymity online. They’re experiencing fatigue with ebooks, with dating apps, with social
media. They’re craving something else in this era of quantified selves, and tracked locations,
and indexed answers to every possible question. Except, perhaps the questions of who you
really are, and what life has in store for you.

5/9

http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/05/anonymity-privacy-and-security-online/

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/70696-as-e-book-sales-decline-digital-fatigue-grows.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/10/the-unbearable-exhaustion-of-dating-apps/505184/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/27/poll-most-teens-have-taken-social-media-break/100982708/

Ruby Warrington is a lifestyle writer whose New Age guidebook Material Girl, Mystical World
came out in May 2017—just ahead of the wave of astrology book sales this summer. She
also runs a mystical esoterica website, The Numinous, a word which Merriam-Webster
defines as meaning “supernatural or mysterious,” but which Warrington defines on her
website as “that which is unknown, or unknowable.”

“I think that almost as a counterbalance to the fact that we live in such a quantifiable and
meticulously organized world, there is a desire to connect to and tap into that numinous
part of ourselves,” Warrington says. “I see astrology as a language of symbols that describes
those parts of the human experience that we don’t necessarily have equations and numbers
and explanations for.”

J. Walter Thompson’s intelligence group released a trend report in 2016 called “ Unreality”
that says much the same thing: “We are increasingly turning to unreality as a form of escape
and a way to search for other kinds of freedom, truth and meaning,” it reads. “What
emerges is an appreciation for magic and spirituality, the knowingly unreal, and the
intangible aspects of our lives that defy big data and the ultra-transparency of the web.” This
sort of reactionary cultural 180 has happened before—after the Enlightenment’s emphasis
on rationality and the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantic
movement found people turning toward intuition, nature, and the supernatural. It seems
we may be at a similar turning point. New York magazine even used the seminal Romantic
painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog to illustrate Andrew Sullivan’s recent anti-technology
essay, “I Used to Be a Human Being.”

JWT and another trend-forecasting group, WGSN, in its report “Millennials: New Spirituality,”
lump astrology in with other New Age mystical trends that have caught on with young
people in recent years: healing crystals, sound baths, and tarot, among others.

“I think it’s become generally less acceptable to just arbitrarily shit on things as like ‘that’s not
rational, or that’s stupid because that’s not fact,’” says Nicole Leffel, a 28-year-old software
engineer who lives in New York.

Bugbee, the editor-in-chief of The Cut, noticed this shift a couple years ago. “I could just tell
that people were sick of a certain kind of snarky tone,” she said. Up to that point, the site
had been running slightly irreverent horoscopes with gifs meant to encapsulate the week’s
mood for each sign. But Bugbee realized “that people wanted sincerity more than anything.
So we just kind of went full sincere with [the horoscopes], and that’s when we saw real
interest happen.”

But a sincere burgeoning interest in astrology doesn’t mean people are wholesale
abandoning rationality for more mystical beliefs. Nicholas Campion, a historian of astrology,
points out that the question of whether people “believe” in astrology is both impossible to
answer, and not really a useful question to ask. People might say they don’t “believe” in

6/9

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062437112&aff=hcweb

Front Page

https://www.jwtintelligence.com/trend-reports/unreality/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-my-distraction-sickness-and-yours.html

https://psmag.com/news/why-are-young-people-so-into-healing-crystals

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/tune-in-and-chill-out-what-are-sound-baths-and-why-you-should-try-one/2017/05/02/e74c697c-2b7c-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html?utm_term=.510b94bbf9aa

https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-actually-believe-in-astrology-71192

astrology, but still identify with their zodiac sign. They may like to read their horoscope, but
don’t change their behavior based on what it says. There is more nuance than this statistic
allows for.

Many mainstream examinations of astrology as a trend are deeply concerned with
debunking. They like to trot out the National Science Foundation survey that measures
whether people think astrology is scientific, and remind readers that it’s not. Which, it’s not.
But that’s not really the point.

While there are surely some people who blindly accept astrology as fact and view it as on
par with a discipline like biology, that doesn’t seem to be the case among many of the young
adults who are fueling this renaissance of the zodiac. The people I spoke to for this piece
often referred to astrology as a tool, or a kind of language—one that, for many, is more
metaphorical than literal.

“Astrology is a system that looks at cycles, and we use the language of planets,” says Alec
Verkuilen Brogan, a 29-year-old chiropractic student based in the Bay Area who has also
studied astrology for 10 years. “It’s not like these planets are literally going around and being
like ‘Now, I’m going to do this.’ It’s a language to speak to the seasons of life.”

Michael Stevens, a 27-year-old who lives in Brooklyn, was in the quarter-life crisis season of
life around the time of the total solar eclipse in August this year. “Traditionally, I’m a skeptic,”
he says. “I’m a hard-core, like Dana Scully from X-Files type of person. And then shit started
to happen in life.” Around the time of the eclipse, in the course of his advertising work, he
cold-called Susan Miller of Astrology Zone, to ask if she would put some ads on her site.

She was annoyed, he says, that he called her at the end of the month, which is when she
writes her famously lengthy horoscopes. But then she asked him for his sign—Sagittarius.
“And she’s like, ‘Oh, okay, this new moon’s rough for you.’” They talked about work and
relationship troubles. (Miller doesn’t remember having this conversation specifically, but
says “I’m always nice to the people who cold-call. It sounds totally like me.”)

Studies have shown that if you write a generic personality description and tell someone it
applies to them, they’re likely to perceive it as accurate—whether that’s in the form of a
description of their zodiac sign or something else.

Stevens says he could’ve potentially read into his conversation with Miller in this way. “She’s
like ‘You’re going through a lot right now,’” he says. “Who isn’t? It’s 2017. ”

Still, he says the conversation made him feel better; it spurred him to take action. In the
months between his call with Miller and our conversation in October, Stevens left his
advertising job and found a new one in staffing. Shortly before we spoke, he and his
girlfriend broke up.

7/9

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-are-horoscopes-still-thing-180957701/

https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-believing-in-astrology-is-not-as-harmless-as-you-th-1595802206

https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report/chapter-7/public-knowledge-about-s-t/pseudoscience

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232487874_Why_people_perceive_horoscopes_as_being_true_A_review

“[I realized] I’m acting like a shitty, non-playable character in a Dungeons and Dragons RPG,”
Stevens says, “so I should probably make choices, and pursue some of the good things that
could happen if I just [cared] about being a happy person in a real way.”

Stevens’s story exemplifies a prevailing attitude among many of the people I talked to—that
it doesn’t matter if astrology is real; it matters if it’s useful.

“We take astrology very seriously, but we also don’t necessarily believe in it,” says Annabel
Gat, the staff astrologer at Broadly, “because it’s a tool for self-reflection, it’s not a religion or
a science. It’s just a way to look at the world and a way to think about things.”

Beusman, who hired Gat at Broadly, shares her philosophy. “I believe several conflicting
things in all areas of my life,” she says. “So for me it’s very easy to hold these two ideas in my
head at once. This could not be true at all, and also, I’ll be like ‘Well, I have three planets
entering Scorpio next month, so I should make some savvy career decisions.’”

This attitude is exemplified by The Hairpin’s “Astrology Is Fake” column, by Rosa Lyster, with
headlines like “Astrology Is Fake But Leos Are Famous,” and “Astrology Is Fake But Taurus
Hates Change.”

It might be that Millennials are more comfortable living in the borderlands between
skepticism and belief because they’ve spent so much of their lives online, in another space
that is real and unreal at the same time. That so many people find astrology meaningful is a
reminder that something doesn’t have to be real to feel true. Don’t we find truth in fiction?

In describing her attitude toward astrology, Leffel recalled a line from Neil Gaiman’s
American Gods in which the main character, Shadow, wonders whether lightning in the sky
was from a magical thunderbird, “or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two
ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point after
all.”

If the “astrology is fake but it’s true” stance seems paradoxical, well, perhaps the paradox is
what’s attractive. Many people offered me hypotheses to explain astrology’s resurgence.
Digital natives are narcissistic, some suggested, and astrology is a navel-gazing obsession.
People feel powerless here on Earth, others said, so they’re turning to the stars. Of course,
it’s both. Some found it to be an escape from logical “left-brain” thinking; others craved the
order and organization the complex system brought to the chaos of life. It’s both. That’s the
point, after all.

To understand astrology’s appeal is to get comfortable with paradoxes. It feels
simultaneously cosmic and personal; spiritual and logical; ineffable and concrete; real and
unreal. It can be a relief, in a time of division, not to have to choose. It can be freeing, in a
time that values black and white, ones and zeros, to look for answers in the gray. It can be
meaningful to draw lines in the space between moments of time, or the space between

8/9

https://www.thehairpin.com/2017/07/astrology-is-fake-but-leos-are-famous/

https://www.thehairpin.com/2017/04/astrology-is-fake-but-taurus-hates-change/

pinpricks of light in the night sky, even if you know deep down they’re really light-years
apart, and have no connection at all.

Julie Beck is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she
oversees the Family section, and is the creator of The
Friendship Files.
Connect

9/9

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/

https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/friendship-files/

The New Age of Astrology

By Malcolm Gladwell

newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/is-marijuana-as-safe-as-we-think

1/10

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/is-marijuana-as-safe-as-we-think

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a22378

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a22469

Legalization invites debate about how the drug will be dosed and marketed.

Illustration by Javier Jaén

2/10

A few years ago, the National Academy of Medicine convened a panel of sixteen leading
medical experts to analyze the scientific literature on cannabis. The report they prepared,
which came out in January of 2017, runs to four hundred and sixty-eight pages. It contains no
bombshells or surprises, which perhaps explains why it went largely unnoticed. It simply
stated, over and over again, that a drug North Americans have become enthusiastic about
remains a mystery.

For example, smoking pot is widely supposed to diminish the nausea associated with
chemotherapy. But, the panel pointed out, “there are no good-quality randomized trials
investigating this option.” We have evidence for marijuana as a treatment for pain, but “very
little is known about the efficacy, dose, routes of administration, or side effects of commonly
used and commercially available cannabis products in the United States.” The caveats
continue. Is it good for epilepsy? “Insufficient evidence.” Tourette’s syndrome? Limited
evidence. A.L.S., Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s? Insufficient evidence. Irritable-bowel
syndrome? Insufficient evidence. Dementia and glaucoma? Probably not. Anxiety? Maybe.
Depression? Probably not.

Then come Chapters 5 through 13, the heart of the report, which concern marijuana’s potential
risks. The haze of uncertainty continues. Does the use of cannabis increase the likelihood of
fatal car accidents? Yes. By how much? Unclear. Does it affect motivation and cognition? Hard
to say, but probably. Does it affect employment prospects? Probably. Will it impair academic
achievement? Limited evidence. This goes on for pages.

We need proper studies, the panel concluded, on the health effects of cannabis on children
and teen-agers and pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers and “older populations” and
“heavy cannabis users”; in other words, on everyone except the college student who smokes a
joint once a month. The panel also called for investigation into “the pharmacokinetic and
pharmacodynamic properties of cannabis, modes of delivery, different concentrations, in
various populations, including the dose-response relationships of cannabis and THC or other
cannabinoids.”

Figuring out the “dose-response relationship” of a new compound is something a
pharmaceutical company does from the start of trials in human subjects, as it prepares a new
drug application for the F.D.A. Too little of a powerful drug means that it won’t work. Too much
means that it might do more harm than good. The amount of active ingredient in a pill and the
metabolic path that the ingredient takes after it enters your body—these are things that
drugmakers will have painstakingly mapped out before the product comes on the market, with
a tractor-trailer full of supporting documentation.

With marijuana, apparently, we’re still waiting for this information. It’s hard to study a
substance that until very recently has been almost universally illegal. And the few studies we
do have were done mostly in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when cannabis was not nearly
as potent as it is now. Because of recent developments in plant breeding and growing

3/10

https://www.newyorker.com/tag/marijuana

http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2017/health-effects-of-cannabis-and-cannabinoids.aspx

techniques, the typical concentration of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, has
gone from the low single digits to more than twenty per cent—from a swig of near-beer to a
tequila shot.

Are users smoking less, to compensate for the drug’s new potency? Or simply getting more
stoned, more quickly? Is high-potency cannabis more of a problem for younger users or for
older ones? For some drugs, the dose-response curve is linear: twice the dose creates twice
the effect. For other drugs, it’s nonlinear: twice the dose can increase the effect tenfold, or
hardly at all. Which is true for cannabis? It also matters, of course, how cannabis is consumed.
It can be smoked, vaped, eaten, or applied to the skin. How are absorption patterns affected?

Last May, not long before Canada legalized the recreational use of marijuana, Beau Kilmer, a
drug-policy expert with the RAND Corporation, testified before the Canadian Parliament. He
warned that the fastest-growing segment of the legal market in Washington State was extracts
for inhalation, and that the mean THC concentration for those products was more than sixty-
five per cent. “We know little about the health consequences—risks and benefits—of many of
the cannabis products likely to be sold in nonmedical markets,” he said. Nor did we know how
higher-potency products would affect THC consumption.

4/10

When it comes to cannabis, the best-case scenario is that we will muddle through, learning
more about its true effects as we go along and adapting as needed—the way, say, the once
extraordinarily lethal innovation of the automobile has been gradually tamed in the course of

5/10

its history. For those curious about the worst-case scenario, Alex Berenson has written a short
manifesto, “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence .”

Berenson begins his book with an account of a conversation he had with his wife, a
psychiatrist who specializes in treating mentally ill criminals. They were discussing one of the
many grim cases that cross her desk—“the usual horror story, somebody who’d cut up his
grandmother or set fire to his apartment.” Then his wife said something like “Of course, he was
high, been smoking pot his whole life.”

Of course? I said.

Yeah, they all smoke.

Well . . . other things too, right?

Sometimes. But they all smoke.

Berenson used to be an investigative reporter for the Times, where he covered, among other
things, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Then he left the paper to write a popular
series of thrillers. At the time of his conversation with his wife, he had the typical layman’s view
of cannabis, which is that it is largely benign. His wife’s remark alarmed him, and he set out to
educate himself. Berenson is constrained by the same problem the National Academy of
Medicine faced—that, when it comes to marijuana, we really don’t know very much. But he has
a reporter’s tenacity, a novelist’s imagination, and an outsider’s knack for asking intemperate
questions. The result is disturbing.

The first of Berenson’s questions concerns what has long been the most worrisome point
about cannabis: its association with mental illness. Many people with serious psychiatric
illness smoke lots of pot. The marijuana lobby typically responds to this fact by saying that
pot-smoking is a response to mental illness, not the cause of it—that people with psychiatric
issues use marijuana to self-medicate. That is only partly true. In some cases, heavy cannabis
use does seem to cause mental illness. As the National Academy panel declared, in one of its
few unequivocal conclusions, “Cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing
schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use, the greater the risk.”

Berenson thinks that we are far too sanguine about this link. He wonders how large the risk is,
and what might be behind it. In one of the most fascinating sections of “Tell Your Children,” he
sits down with Erik Messamore, a psychiatrist who specializes in neuropharmacology and in
the treatment of schizophrenia. Messamore reports that, following the recent rise in marijuana
use in the U.S. (it has almost doubled in the past two decades, not necessarily as the result of
legal reforms), he has begun to see a new kind of patient: older, and not from the marginalized
communities that his patients usually come from. These are otherwise stable middle-class
professionals. Berenson writes, “A surprising number of them seemed to have used only
cannabis and no other drugs before their breaks. The disease they’d developed looked like
schizophrenia, but it had developed later—and their prognosis seemed to be worse. Their
delusions and paranoia hardly responded to antipsychotics.”

6/10

Messamore theorizes that THC may interfere with the brain’s anti-inflammatory mechanisms,
resulting in damage to nerve cells and blood vessels. Is this the reason, Berenson wonders, for
the rising incidence of schizophrenia in the developed world, where cannabis use has also
increased? In the northern parts of Finland, incidence of the disease has nearly doubled since
1993. In Denmark, cases have risen twenty-five per cent since 2000. In the United States,
hospital emergency rooms have seen a fifty-per-cent increase in schizophrenia admissions
since 2006. If you include cases where schizophrenia was a secondary diagnosis, annual
admissions in the past decade have increased from 1.26 million to 2.1 million.

Berenson’s second question derives from the first. The delusions and paranoia that often
accompany psychoses can sometimes trigger violent behavior. If cannabis is implicated in a
rise in psychoses, should we expect the increased use of marijuana to be accompanied by a
rise in violent crime, as Berenson’s wife suggested? Once again, there is no definitive answer,
so Berenson has collected bits and pieces of evidence. For example, in a 2013 paper in the
Journal of Interpersonal Violence, researchers looked at the results of a survey of more than
twelve thousand American high-school students. The authors assumed that alcohol use
among students would be a predictor of violent behavior, and that marijuana use would
predict the opposite. In fact, those who used only marijuana were three times more likely to be
physically aggressive than abstainers were; those who used only alcohol were 2.7 times more
likely to be aggressive. Observational studies like these don’t establish causation. But they
invite the sort of research that could.

Berenson looks, too, at the early results from the state of Washington, which, in 2014, became
the first U.S. jurisdiction to legalize recreational marijuana. Between 2013 and 2017, the state’s
aggravated-assault rate rose seventeen per cent, which was nearly twice the increase seen
nationwide, and the murder rate rose forty-four per cent, which was more than twice the
increase nationwide. We don’t know that an increase in cannabis use was responsible for that
surge in violence. Berenson, though, finds it strange that, at a time when Washington may have
exposed its population to higher levels of what is widely assumed to be a calming substance,
its citizens began turning on one another with increased aggression.

His third question is whether cannabis serves as a gateway drug. There are two possibilities.
The first is that marijuana activates certain behavioral and neurological pathways that ease
the onset of more serious addictions. The second possibility is that marijuana offers a safer
alternative to other drugs: that if you start smoking pot to deal with chronic pain you never
graduate to opioids.

Which is it? This is a very hard question to answer. We’re only a decade or so into the
widespread recreational use of high-potency marijuana. Maybe cannabis opens the door to
other drugs, but only after prolonged use. Or maybe the low-potency marijuana of years past
wasn’t a gateway, but today’s high-potency marijuana is. Methodologically, Berenson points
out, the issue is complicated by the fact that the first wave of marijuana legalization took place
on the West Coast, while the first serious wave of opioid addiction took place in the middle of
the country. So, if all you do is eyeball the numbers, it looks as if opioid overdoses are lowest
in cannabis states and highest in non-cannabis states.

7/10

Not surprisingly, the data we have are messy. Berenson, in his role as devil’s advocate,
emphasizes the research that sees cannabis as opening the door to opioid use. For example,
two studies of identical twins—in the Netherlands and in Australia—show that, in cases where
one twin used cannabis before the age of seventeen and the other didn’t, the cannabis user
was several times more likely to develop an addiction to opioids. Berenson also enlists a
statistician at N.Y.U. to help him sort through state-level overdose data, and what he finds is
not encouraging: “States where more people used cannabis tended to have more overdoses.”

The National Academy panel is more judicious. Its conclusion is that we simply don’t know
enough, because there haven’t been any “systematic” studies. But the panel’s uncertainty is
scarcely more reassuring than Berenson’s alarmism. Seventy-two thousand Americans died in
2017 of drug overdoses. Should you embark on a pro-cannabis crusade without knowing
whether it will add to or subtract from that number?

Drug policy is always clearest at the fringes. Illegal opioids are at one end. They are
dangerous. Manufacturers and distributors belong in prison, and users belong in drug-
treatment programs. The cannabis industry would have us believe that its product, like coffee,
belongs at the other end of the continuum. “Flow Kana partners with independent multi-
generational farmers who cultivate under full sun, sustainably, and in small batches,” the
promotional literature for one California cannabis brand reads. “Using only organic methods,
these stewards of the land have spent their lives balancing a unique and harmonious
relationship between the farm, the genetics and the terroir.” But cannabis is not coffee. It’s
somewhere in the middle. The experience of most users is relatively benign and predictable;
the experience of a few, at the margins, is not. Products or behaviors that have that kind of
muddled risk profile are confusing, because it is very difficult for those in the benign middle to
appreciate the experiences of those at the statistical tails. Low-frequency risks also take
longer and are far harder to quantify, and the lesson of “Tell Your Children” and the National
Academy report is that we aren’t yet in a position to do so. For the moment, cannabis probably
belongs in the category of substances that society permits but simultaneously discourages.
Cigarettes are heavily taxed, and smoking is prohibited in most workplaces and public spaces.
Alcohol can’t be sold without a license and is kept out of the hands of children. Prescription
drugs have rules about dosages, labels that describe their risks, and policies that govern their
availability. The advice that seasoned potheads sometimes give new users—“start low and go
slow”—is probably good advice for society as a whole, at least until we better understand what
we are dealing with.

8/10

“That reminds me of the time Hamlet and I—did I mention I knew Hamlet?—Hamlet and I . . . ”

Late last year, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb,
announced a federal crackdown on e-cigarettes. He had seen the data on soaring use among
teen-agers, and, he said, “it shocked my conscience.” He announced that the F.D.A. would ban
many kinds of flavored e-cigarettes, which are especially popular with teens, and would restrict
the retail outlets where e-cigarettes were available.

In the dozen years since e-cigarettes were introduced into the marketplace, they have attracted
an enormous amount of attention. There are scores of studies and papers on the subject in the
medical and legal literature, grappling with the questions raised by the new technology. Vaping
is clearly popular among kids. Is it a gateway to traditional tobacco use? Some public-health
experts worry that we’re grooming a younger generation for a lifetime of dangerous addiction.
Yet other people see e-cigarettes as a much safer alternative for adult smokers looking to
satisfy their nicotine addiction. That’s the British perspective. Last year, a Parliamentary
committee recommended cutting taxes on e-cigarettes and allowing vaping in areas where it
had previously been banned. Since e-cigarettes are as much as ninety-five per cent less
harmful than regular cigarettes, the committee argued, why not promote them? Gottlieb said
that he was splitting the difference between the two positions—giving adults “opportunities to

9/10

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul

transition to non-combustible products,” while upholding the F.D.A.’s “solemn mandate to
make nicotine products less accessible and less appealing to children.” He was immediately
criticized.

“Somehow, we have completely lost all sense of public-health perspective,” Michael Siegel, a
public-health researcher at Boston University, wrote after the F.D.A. announcement:

Every argument that the F.D.A. is making in justifying a ban on the sale of electronic cigarettes in
convenience stores and gas stations applies even more strongly for real tobacco cigarettes: you
know, the ones that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. Something is terribly
wrong with our sense of perspective when we take the e-cigarettes off the shelf but allow the old-
fashioned ones to remain.

Among members of the public-health community, it is impossible to spend five minutes on the
e-cigarette question without getting into an argument. And this is nicotine they are arguing
about, a drug that has been exhaustively studied by generations of scientists. We don’t worry
that e-cigarettes increase the number of fatal car accidents, diminish motivation and cognition,
or impair academic achievement. The drugs through the gateway that we worry about with e-
cigarettes are Marlboros, not opioids. There are no enormous scientific question marks over
nicotine’s dosing and bio-availability. Yet we still proceed cautiously and carefully with
nicotine, because it is a powerful drug, and when powerful drugs are consumed by lots of
people in new and untested ways we have an obligation to try to figure out what will happen.

A week after Gottlieb announced his crackdown on e-cigarettes, on the ground that they are
too enticing to children, Siegel visited the first recreational-marijuana facility in
Massachusetts. Here is what he found on the menu, each offering laced with large amounts of
a drug, THC, that no one knows much about:

Strawberry-flavored chewy bites
Large, citrus gummy bears
Delectable Belgian dark chocolate bars
Assorted fruit-flavored chews
Assorted fruit-flavored cubes
Raspberry flavored confection
Raspberry flavored lozenges
Chewy, cocoa caramel bite-sized treats
Raspberry & watermelon flavored lozenges
Chocolate-chip brownies.

He concludes, “This is public health in 2018?” ♦

An earlier version of this piece misstated the percentages of increase for murders and
aggravated assaults in the state of Washington.

10/10

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2018/11/fda-to-announce-ban-on-sale-of-most.html

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2018/11/will-marijuana-become-next-juul.html

Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?