One of the arguments for making marijuana legal was that way dangerous drug cartels wouldn't sell it and make money off of it. Legal marijuana is tested to make sure it doesn't have dangerous pesticide residues in it and that it's not spiked with other drugs such as fentanyl. People who sold legal marijuana would have to pay to have it tested and that cost would be passed on to the consumer. As always there is a problem with leftist reasoning. Legal marijuana has not eliminated the illegal market because the people who sell illegal marijuana don't pay for it to be tested and so can charge less for it.
Michelle Alexander is a very influential person who made an argument against the imprisonment of black drug dealers In fact she went further and wrote a book called "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness". Beginning in the 1880s, the term Jim Crow was used as a reference to practices, laws or institutions related to the physical separation of black people from white people. Jim Crow laws in various states required the segregation of races in such common areas as restaurants, theaters, schools, parks and buses. “Jim Crow” laws mandated “separate but equal” status for African Americans but in reality the equal standard was not enforced and blacks were discriminated against. According to Michelle Alexander the incarceration of blacks for drug crimes, was just like the Jim Crow laws. The principal of my son's school asked the parents of students attending that school to read her book. One parent who read her book after the principal asked him too was interviewed by the New York Post. He disagreed with her idea that the war on drugs was racist since drugs hurt black people and making war on whose who sold drugs helped those black people who didn't use or sell marijuana. Unfortunately many people in government agree with Michelle Alexander and marijuana has been legalized. Legalizing marijuana has led to increased use of marijuana. The terrible consequences of marijuana use on mental health and society were discussed in previous lessons.
Many people say that marijuana will bring in lots of money to communities that need the money. Dan does that in the video below.
Dan talks about the money marijuana would bring in but not about the costs of marijuana. He doesn't ask where the money comes from? If people in the community pay others in the community for marijuana than the money the sellers get is equal to the money consumers paid. The net gain is zero. The government gets taxes but if it just wants taxes it could simply raise them without marijuana at all. Dan says marijuana is safer than alcohol but like most leftists he doesn't ask how much marijuana is safer than how much alcohol? Modern marijuana is much more potent than the old kind of marijuana. Dan says marijuana isn't a threat to public safety but the previous lesson showed that it is a huge threat to public safety. He believes making pot legal will take revenue away from the criminal drug cartels but legalization has simply made it easier for the drug cartels to grow more and sell more marijuana.
Does marijuana really bring in money to communities and cash strapped city and state governments? That is discussed in the video below.One thing marijuana does is make it makes people less motivated to work and be productive and less able to be productive. The less productive people are, the less money they make and the less tax that the city can collect. There was an article by Steven Malanga in the City Journal about this. He wrote:
A growing number of Americans aren’t simply out of a
job. They’re no longer fit for work.
This is happening in a big way in New York City, the city whose economy would be lighted up by marijuana according to mayor Eric Adams. Steve Cuozzo a reporter for the New York Post wrote about what is happening to NYC in an article titled Legal weed is turning New York workers into zombies. Here are a few of the examples he gave:
At Upper East Side gourmet food emporium Agata and Valentina, one cashier was
“so out of it, staring into space while people waited in line,” a bank executive
who’s a regular customer there told me.
“She forgot to give me my change. She closed the register. I had to wait for
someone to come with the dreaded key. After ten minutes for a 30-second
transaction, she didn’t even apologize.”
Responding to a tweet I posted about discombobulated workers, a follower wrote to say that “The woman running the service desk” at a major Sunset Park auto dealer “was clearly high … had no idea what was going on. Lost my car twice during routine service.”
Real estate man Jordan Cohn tweeted, “I just had a restaurant server lose my credit card. Yep, gone, never to be seen again. My best guess is that it went into the trash by accident.”
How productive is the person going to be while he is waiting for the key to the register or the one waiting for the auto dealer to find his car, or the people waiting in line for food at Agata and Valentina? What if they stop going to Agata and Valentina, what happens to all the sales tax they won't be paying anymore? What about the time Jordan Cohn will have to spend getting another credit card or the time the credit card company has to spend getting him a new one and the time the post office has to spend delivering the credit card?
Many states have legalized marijuana. What has the result been?
New York Times reporter Alex Berenson wrote a book called “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Violence and Mental Health.” Berenson reports that the first four states to legalize marijuana, Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, have seen “sharp increases” in violent crime since 2014.
One result of legalization is that not only don't drug dealers have to hide they can open stores all over and promote the use of marijuana. I was walking in NYC from 17th street to 19th street on 8th avenue and passed 2 stores selling marijuana. I've included photos of them below.
Notice how the store above is selling gummies and edibles with marijuana in them and inviting everyone in to buy some. Making marijuana readily available in tasty candies will encourage people to eat those candies. Does anyone doubt that children will wind up eating those gummies?
Veronica Gill noticed her son, Ryan, “acting really strange” after returning home from a gathering at their friends’ house. She said “My son was sitting on the couch with me, and he started zoning out. At first, I thought he was pretending because he opened his eyes wide and laughed. Then he would zone out for a minute again, then open his eyes wide and laugh,” she said. His laughter suddenly turned into cries for help — and his body started shaking. Her son had taken the weed-infused gummies from a candy drawer from their friend's house. Their friend didn't know how marijuana gummies had gotten into that drawer. The warnings about marijuana in the candies were very small and easy to miss. Ryan is only one of may children who have overdosed on marijuana. The number of calls to poison-control centers for abuse and misuse of cannabis products in Americans ages 6 to 18 has skyrocketed – rising from 510 cases in 2000 to 1,761 in 2020, according to a recent study published in Clinical Toxicology
In the picture below you can see a teddy bear in the window. That sends the message to children and adults that marijuana is just like a nice teddy bear.
Children have eaten treats that their parents brought home, unaware that those treats were laced with marijuana. Some couldn't breath afterwards and had to be intubated in the hospital. That's what happened to Oliver shown in the picture below.
You can watch Oliver's story in the video below.
Oliver's mother took Cannabis to help her sleep. 85% of people who were prescribed marijuana for medical reasons said they experienced better sleep. Those testimonies are contradicted by a review from researchers at top-tier universities, appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that concluded that “evidence from randomized clinical trials does not support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids for most conditions for which it is promoted, such as acute pain and insomnia.” In other words, medical marijuana doesn’t work — right there, in black and white, despite years of promoters and addiction profiteers shouting that it was the next miracle drug. Even before the study health experts generally did not recommend using sleep aids, including Cannabis, on a long-term basis, because of their potential to negatively impact your sleep quality and cause other side effects. "
