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> Tell me, how does an article like this improve the actual problem at hand at all?

Arguably very few articles improve problems at hand, but for over a quarter of the US population, marijuana is legal recreationally. In Canada, marijuana is legal recreationally. And even where marijuana is illegal, it's often not terribly-well-enforced anymore. New York City, the city this publication is based around, has decriminalized the substance and is no longer arresting people for marijuana possession.

The question for this audience is "should I consume it?" and "should we societally start investing in understanding the downsides of consuming large quantities of THC?"

Those are the important questions for these people, who live in the post legalization (or heavily decriminalized) world. And we don't have good answers for those people.

> it shifts the conversation from what should be illegal to a conversation that is totally irrelevant.

The readership of the New Yorker, I would hazard, has already come down strongly on the side of "should not be illegal". It's a liberal publication in a liberal city that has decriminalized marijuana usage, and its readership, I'm almost certain, overlaps strongly with people who are in favor of legalization. Why is the conversation of "is this healthy" not relevant?

I think it's the opposite. You're reading too much into the article. Marijuana has a reputation amongst advocates of being a miracle cure-all for all the world's ailments and no downsides.

This article is asking the question--what are the downsides?

You're instead defending against the notion of criminality.

But you're deflecting from a conversation that's just about enumerating the risks.

We don't know the risks from consuming marijuana (aside from anecdotes, but I've got a good sense of the risk from personal consumption and the effects on people close to me). The marijuana-legalization discussion is advocating that it doesn't have risks, and it's leading to people making uninformed choices. That's the discussion here.

What are the downsides?

Your logic is forcing me to draw parallels with marijuana that I don't want to, but this reasoning is not very persuasive.

Why shouldn't safety be a requirement for something to be legal? Should drunk driving be legal? Should firing a gun in a crowded place be legal? Should serving food that's contaminated with a poisonous substance be legal?

I know that marijuana isn't harmful in the way shooting a firearm or poisoning someone's food is. But this line of reasoning--"never consider safety when determining what's acceptable"--is ludicrous.

I don't think this article has advocated in any way that you should lose your choice to consume marijuana.

Rather, they are advocating that the fundamental conversation around marijuana legalisation--something roughly resembling "it's got no harmful effects and is a magic medical cure-all" deserve re-examining.

Marijuana has been illegal for so long, and the penalties so draconian for the substance, that society has naturally pushed back on that. But it could be pushing back too far--there's all sorts of marijuana discussion that is unwilling to consider whether it has harmful effects.

Alcohol is unsafe, I agree. And that matters. It matters for the car accidents, domestic abuse, and lives that alcoholism destroys. And if the conversation around alcohol involved plugging our ears and pretending it wasn't harmful, then people would routinely engage in unsafe behavior to the detriment of themselves and society.