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President Ronald Reagan often told a joke about a psychologist who takes a little boy into a room that is piled to the ceiling with manure. To the doctor’s shock, the child dives into the fetid pile and starts happily digging with his bare hands, explaining to the startled grownup: “There must be a pony in here somewhere!”

That punch line — a wry warning about the limits of optimism — reminds me of the politicians driving New York’s headlong charge into full marijuana legalization.

There might be a pony in here somewhere. But it could also just be a stinking pile of crap.

Too many city and state officials don’t have answers — and rarely seem curious about — basic questions of how to safeguard public health and safety after legalization. We don’t have firm answers about how to determine safe dosages, labeling and licensing that must accompany the legal sale of pot over the counter.

That has not stopped activists and pols from cheerleading for full legalization, or simply accepting it as inevitable.

Mayor de Blasio has announced that the NYPD will drop a longstanding policy of arresting people for smoking marijuana in public. Sen. Chuck Schumer has vowed to push for legislation that would decriminalize pot at the federal level, allowing individual states to work out regulations.

Gov. Cuomo has signaled he is about to drop his longstanding skepticism about recreational use. This week’s state Democratic convention will reportedly include a resolution that formally commits the party to full legalization.

That isn’t surprising. A recent poll suggests 63% of New Yorkers favor legalization, the highest level ever recorded, and about 2 to 1 over the 32% who oppose it, which makes the idea politically irresistible in this election year.

But this is a case where pols seem to be consulting the polls rather than the professionals.

“Unfortunately, science and medicine was not at the forefront of any policymaking here,” says Yasmin Hurd, a professor of neuroscience, psychiatry and pharmacology who runs the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Hurd told me the rush to legalization has outstripped what we know about the downsides of marijuana use.

“Millions of people in the U.S. have a clinical diagnosis of cannabis use disorder. It’s always shocking that people don’t realize that you can become addicted to marijuana,” she told me. “Different people have different vulnerabilities; it’s not that everyone who smokes will become addicted. But definitely the increased frequency of use, especially earlier teenagers, young children — the earlier they start using, the higher the concentration of THC they use, all enhance addiction vulnerability.”

On the law enforcement side of things, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. took it upon himself to do what Albany lawmakers ought to do: He canvassed cops and prosecutors in states that have already legalized pot, to learn from their mistakes.

“The takeaway from our visiting all those states is that it’s very important to go through this process in an orderly and comprehensive way at the front end,” he says. “If we do as a state, to go toward legalization — and I favor that — it’s actually going to get much more complicated as opposed to easier.”

One example, says Vance, is the question of people growing small amounts of pot for personal use. At what point can cops ask to enter a home to verify how much weed a person has? One what basis could a judge issue a search warrant?

New York history includes some striking examples of well-intentioned government plans spewing awful, unintended consequences. In the 1960s and ’70s, the deinstitutionalization movement led to the wholesale closure of large, poorly run mental health asylums — leaving us with thousands of mentally ill New Yorkers living on our streets and concentrated in even less caring institutions like Rikers Island.

And a hasty legislative sprint in 1973 — a year in which New York City saw 1,600 murders — gave us the harsh, destructive Rockefeller drug laws, with mandatory minimum sentences for possession of even tiny amounts of drugs. The laws wreaked vast havoc and injustice on thousands of families for decades before they were repealed.

We could be poised to make another big mistake.

“There’s no drug on this planet that doesn’t have side effects, especially as the dosing increases,” says Hurd. “Never before did the public vote on whether a particular thing is medicinal. This is the first medication we’re doing that way.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t legalize. But it does mean we should do it thoughtfully and mindfully, based on facts.

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