(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Aug. 3) On marijuana policy, even when the Biden administration faces facts, it uses them for the wrong purposes.
As a result, Second Amendment gun rights are at risk.
The thrust of Biden’s marijuana policy until now has favored legalization and leniency even as all the new empirical data show marijuana to be far more dangerous than public mythology recognizes. A Monday Justice Department court filing in a Mississippi gun case, though, finally acknowledges the science. In any other context, this would be a good thing, even if woefully belated. If the administration were honest and wise, which it isn’t, it would base the rest of its marijuana enforcement on the facts related in the court filing.
Before addressing the gun rights milieu, let’s focus on those facts against marijuana. As the Justice Department writes, “Marijuana intoxication can lead to an altered perception of time, short-term memory loss, impaired perception and motors skills, paranoid thoughts, and even hallucinations.” Moreover, “people who use marijuana are more likely to develop psychosis and long-lasting mental disorders, including schizophrenia.” And: “Marijuana use is also associated with depression, thoughts of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicide.” Keep in mind that this comes from an administration pushing for the liberalization of marijuana use.
As we have editorialized numerous times, these conclusions come from a plethora of recent and amply peer-reviewed studies showing that marijuana is a highly dangerous substance and that legalization has led to higher traffic accident rates and increased health problems, including greater cancer risks and worse incidence of mortality. It even has been shown to do damage to human genes.
Yet again and again, Biden and his fellow Democrats, and some less-than-exemplary Republicans, have, until now, peddled the fiction that marijuana isn’t very harmful. In April, the Drug Enforcement Administration under Biden’s prodding announced that it is reclassifying the narcotic from a Schedule I controlled substance to a Schedule III one, making it less a priority to police and probably watering down penalties for its use…. All of which ordinarily would mean the public should welcome a course reversal on marijuana by this administration. Alas, in this instance it is admitting the drug’s dangers only to push a gun grab that federal courts of appeals have ruled unconstitutional….
[The full column is at this link.]
