Legalization of marijuana will allow law enforcement to focus on more serious crimes and will eliminate the black market.
Mental health problems related to marijuana are overstated and can be explained away without viewing pot as the primary cause.
All these claims, especially those about safety and mental health, are debunked by Alex Berenson's book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.
Berenson, a novelist and New York Times journalist, only began this countercultural work after his typically liberal sentiments about marijuana were challenged by his wife, a forensic psychiatrist, who matter-of-factly suggested he read relevant studies on the subject after she observed, to her husband's surprise, that one of the violent criminals she evaluated in New York was "Of course high" and had "Been smoking pot his whole life." Berenson's book was the unexpected and unwelcome, result of that challenge.
Currently more than sixty percent of Americans have followed that buzzed logic even though "Neither cannabis nor THC has ever been shown to work in randomized clinical trials" which, as the author further notes, is "The only reliable way to prove a drug works." Moreover, what may be marijuana's most effective pain-relieving component, cannabidiol, is almost nonexistent in most cannabis today, so "Whatever good [it] may do is irrelevant."
Even those figures may be understated in view of the fact that in 2014 America's "Emergency rooms saw more than 1.1 million cases that included a diagnosis of marijuana abuse or dependence - up from fewer than 400,000 in 2006." Other studies clearly contradict Senator Cory Booker's assertion that violent crime fell in states that legalized pot and provide instead clear evidence of a substantial rise in murders, assaults and marijuana-related traffic fatalities.
In short, what medical studies and marijuana legalization have clearly shown thus far is that one can expect more pot smokers, more young pot smokers, more heavy pot smokers, more addiction, more crime, a black market filling the demand for more potent and cheaper pot, and a rise in schizophrenia alongside the occasionally grotesque violence associated with that malady.
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