Colorado Christian University hosted a fascinating debate last week on the relative merits of Colorado’s grand marijuana experiment, with Jeff Hunt, Executive Director of the University’s in-house think tank Centennial Institute, taking on marijuana industry attorney Robert Corry.

The event was well-timed; with the national posture tilting decidedly in favor of liberalization of marijuana laws, it seems prudent to take an objective look at how such liberalization has been playing out in the states where it has been applied.

It is difficult to deny that the state’s experience with marijuana legalization has not been entirely benign, but Mr. Corry managed to anyway; testament, perhaps, to his courtroom-honed skill at defending the indefensible.

Yet in Colorado we do find some challenges; Mr Hunt outlined some of the difficulties, including an escalation in traffic accidents and deaths related to marijuana use, and a spike in the number of marijuana-intoxicated young people appearing in hospital emergency rooms.

Neither issue presents a tidy fix. The traffic-accident problem, for instance, is paradoxical; we know that a) we are experiencing a substantial increase in the rate of accidents and deaths on the roads, which are b) directly related to marijuana intoxication at the time of the accident. However, we are also informed that c) there is no reliable and practical roadside test, nor indeed any universally accepted blood level of THC demarking verifiable intoxication, for which to use as an enforcement measure to combat these deadly figures.

One could argue that it is forgivable, prudent even, to insist that we better ascertain the nature and characteristics of the active ingredient of a substance, hitherto legally prohibited, before unleashing it to relatively widespread use in society.

Such practical problems affirm that the question of how to handle drug use, and the laws concerning it, in this country is a notoriously difficult one.

At least the issue is being addressed, soundly or not, at the proper level. One of the more admirable traits of the American political system is the oft-forgotten concept of federalism; individual states serving as laboratories of democracy. Of course, part of that equation is that some of those experiments are destined to fail. The allure of federalism lies not only in the freedom and imaginative energy allowed expression at the state level, but in the fact that if an innovation is a gawdawful idea, it is better that its failure, and the consequences of its failure, be confined to a single state rather than the entire nation. Thank goodness, for instance, that Vermont’s ill-fated and short lived single payer health care experiment was isolated to the Green Mountain State.

There are, historically, legitimate and thoughtful conservative arguments for marijuana legalization. Folks like Mr. Corry ecstatically point out to conservative crowds that such luminaries as Wm. F. Buckley Jr. and Milton Friedman were proponents of legalization. But the examination of their proposals pretty much stops there. The traditional argument advanced by such thinkers – one I feel remains valid – is that legalization ought to be a vehicle for the control of marijuana use; in other words, a weapon brought to bear for the express purpose of solving the drug problem. Buckley was quite clear and adamant on this point. He proposed that marijuana be legalized, in order to alleviate some of the problems created by the War on Drugs – mostly revolving around public cost and allocation of police resources – but subsequently be assigned the same social sanction attached to other undesirable activities, such as smoking, or contracting syphilis, or using racially offensive language.

The problem in Colorado with our legalization experiment is that it took an entirely different approach; rather than seeking legalization as a method for controlling the drug problem, marijuana proponents, by and large, simply proclaim that there is no problem – that marijuana, if anything, is something of a wonder drug with almost infinite, magical benefits.

I don’t know – and Mr.  Corry doesn’t know – whether or not recreational marijuana provides real benefits or not. All proffered evidence is anecdotal, untested. THC’s properties make it remarkably resistant to research. Its psychiatric effects are notoriously unpredictable, varying widely between individuals.

What we do know is that, whatever your stance on legalization, it’s commercialization has generated some problems that ought to be intolerable in a civilized society, and pretending the problems do not exist is not a responsible option.

With the consequences of marijuana legalization becoming more pervasive, and the specter of widespread liberalization of drug laws rising with an air of inevitability, we would be wise to take a step back, and ask objectively the question: Has legalization advanced or hindered our efforts as a society to address the public problems created by drug use?