By Monterey Bud
As America’s exasperated voters prepare to queue up at their respective polling location on November 8, the Las Vegas Sun and the New York Times have something they want you to know. They support legalizing recreational marijuana as a means of ending the disastrous war on drugs.
While the Las Vegas Sun focused on the disparity between minority arrest rates for personal marijuana use, and the billions wasted to carry out this bigoted policy, the New York Times emphasized the simple fact that 60% of recently polled Americans support the recreational legalization of marijuana. Regardless of which data sets the archaic drug war is measured by, it’s been nothing short of an abject failure.
In justifying their support for marijuana legalization, The New York Times referred to a September 2016 Cato report.
“States that have legalized recreational use have so far had no meaningful uptick in the use of marijuana by teenagers, or other negative consequences predicted by opponents. For example, in Colorado, drug-related expulsions and suspensions from schools have gone down in recent years. There has been no spike in drug-related traffic accidents and fatalities in Colorado or Washington.”
Understanding this national moment of clarity and consensus on legalization could be fleeting, the New York Times emphasized the next administration may be less supportive than the current one.
“Passage of these proposals should increase pressure on the federal government to change how it treats marijuana. The Obama administration has chosen not to enforce federal antimarijuana laws in states like Colorado and Washington. But this bizarre situation can’t last — even as more states legalize the drug, state-licensed marijuana businesses remain criminal operations under federal law. Even if they are not prosecuted by the federal government, this conflict in their legal status creates immense problems.”
As for the Las Vegas Sun, they drilled down on the type of facts that anti-pot zealots like Sheldon Adelson just love to ignore.
“Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures and decades of effort on drug eradication, millions of Americans continue to use the drug. Look it up. The 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the most recent year available, shows that 22.2 million Americans had used the drug within the past month when they were surveyed. Compared to 2002, marijuana use was up among all age groups survey save for one: 12- to 17-year-olds. Among the U.S. population of 18- to 25-year-olds, 22 percent were users.”
The demographics of today’s politically connected powerbrokers are rapidly changing. And, as we witness the dogmatic haters of legalization slowly being aged out of office, today’s politically active constituents in pro-pot states are driving the transformational reform that will provide tomorrow’s generation greater opportunity, fewer threats to their freedom, and a reduced likelihood of falling prey to the ravages of pharmaceutical addiction.
