Will more marijuana use make America a better place?
Not many who’ve seen and smelled what legalizing the drug has done to cities like New York, D.C. and San Francisco would say so.
Yet President Donald Trump is contemplating a change to marijuana’s federal classification that would make it easier to buy and more profitable to sell.
The pot industry is heavily invested in getting its product recategorized from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 drug, and industry leaders ponied up for a $1-million-a-plate Trump fundraising dinner earlier this month to hear what the president had in mind, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The president should ignore the well-funded cannabis lobby. What matters is what more and cheaper marijuana will mean for ordinary Americans.
Twenty-four states have legalized recreational use of the drug, despite the revealing results experienced by the first state to do so.
Taking advantage of high Democratic turnout the year of President Barack Obama’s reelection, activists passed a Colorado ballot measure to make pot legal back in 2012.
Legalization didn’t take effect until 2014, but by 2022 marijuana use in Colorado and other states that had legalized by then was 24% higher than in states where recreational use remained illegal.
A new study by the South Korean scholar Sunyoung Lee in the International Review of Law and Economics examines what’s happened to crime levels in U.S. states that have legalized pot.
Lee writes his findings “do not yield conclusive evidence supporting a reduction in crime rates after legalizing recreational marijuana. Rather, they underscore notable positive associations with property crimes and suggest potential correlations with violent crimes …”
The marijuana lobby often claims prohibition, not the drug itself, drives crime.
That would be a bad argument even without evidence like Lee’s which suggests legal weed makes crime worse.
After all, any profit-driven criminal enterprise could be shut down by legalizing the crime in question:
If bank robbery were legal, bank robbers wouldn’t need to use guns.
If auto theft were legal, there wouldn’t be violence associated with black-market chop shops because the chop shops would be as legal as the commercial marijuana industry is today.
Legalize everything Tony Soprano does, and Tony won’t have to get so rough — but he’ll only do more of what he was doing before.
Libertarians who argue for legalizing drugs to stop drug violence are closer than they realize to the radicals on the left who argue property crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted.
The psychology is the same: They sympathize with those who make it harder to live in a civilized society, and they reject society’s right to defend itself.
There are downsides to laws against marijuana, just as there are costs to protecting private property and citizens’ bodily safety.
But the costs are well worth paying when the alternative is passivity in the face of aggression — handing your belongings or your life over to any thug who makes a demand.
At first marijuana legalization was sold to voters as a matter of leaving people alone to consume what they want in private, without bothering anybody else.
Yet millions of Americans have now lived long enough with pot legalization, or non-enforcement of laws still on the books, to know the pot lobby perpetrated a fraud:
What the country has actually had to deal with is pot smoking so rife in public the offensive smell — and the sights and sounds of intoxication — smacks you in the face.
It’s hardly different from dope-heads blowing smoke right in your eyes on the street.
That’s not the worst crime in the world — but neither is shoplifting, and there’s no reason to tolerate either.
Tolerating such things only breeds more tolerance for worse abuses, which is what has accustomed progressives to treating even violent criminals leniently.
Two scenes in the suburbs of D.C. convinced me pot acceptance has gone too far:
First was seeing an African American bus driver, on a blazing hot summer day, order two dope-smoking teens to put out their joints and notice there were children around.
To the extent our cities work at all is because of working-class men like him — and the rest of us have to decide whether we’re on his side or the teens’.
A year or so later, I watched a young mother one bright October afternoon hold her small daughter’s hand as they walked through a neighborhood reeking of high-potency pot.
The multibillion-dollar weed industry got to advertise its product to a little girl about 4 years old that day.
(It’s an industry that, notoriously, even sells its drug in candy form, as “gummies.”)
Our cities and towns shouldn’t be open-air drug dens, and President Trump shouldn’t let the pot lobby get high off of making Americans’ lives worse.
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