Pot-Positive Traffic Fatalities Up 100% in Colorado

Cybercast News Service ^ | November 26, 2014 - 9:48 AM | Cully Stimson

[Olog-hai]

… The data coming out of Colorado is exhibit A on why voters should reject legalization efforts. Even the Democratic governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper, said that legalizing marijuana in Colorado was “reckless.” As I have written at Heritage, pot-positive traffic fatalities have gone up 100 percent since voters legalized pot in Colorado. This is true despite the fact that overall traffic fatalities in Colorado have gone down since 2007.

A report by a federal grant-funded agency in Colorado found seven specific negative side effects that pot legalization has caused in Colorado:

1. the majority of DUI drug arrests involve marijuana;
2. youth consumption of marijuana has increased;
3. drug-related suspensions/expulsions increased 32 percent over a 5-year period and a majority was for marijuana;
4. an increase in college users;
5. almost 50 percent of Denver arrestees tested positive for marijuana;
6. marijuana-related emergency room visits increased 57 percent from 2011-2013; and
7. marijuana-related hospitalizations has increased 82 percent since 2008.

Perhaps people are also aware of new scientific studies pointing to the inherent dangers of marijuana. For example, the British health research journal The Lancet Psychiatry recently concluded that teens who smoke marijuana are “also 60 percent less likely to graduate college and seven times more likely to attempt suicide.” …

[Impy]

More DUIs in CO now involve weed rather than booze? Lovely.

[eldoradude]

As far as I can tell, recreation pot was legalized in Colorado effective September, 2013, so that would have no impact on the stats from 2007 to 2012.

The whole point is that legalization is not going to improve those numbers. It's not okay to drive stoned any more than it's okay to drive drunk, or on Ambien, and anything else that impairs common sense.

I have an ex named Michelle who now thinks it's perfectly ok to drive down the road smoking a pipe full of weed because it's legal now in Colorado. She didn't before because weed was illegal. She's a lousy driver when she's straight and weed will not improve her skill.

Bottom line here - smoke it all you want at home just stay the f&%k off the road!

[GeronL]

So bringing up light bulbs, or weapons or other things is A-Okay though, because that is what I was responding to in another post.

I will assume you also admonished that poster for expanding beyond the topic at hand too

“Making marijuana legal is retarted, sir!”

...............

How about making this thread part of the POT CAUCUS so that people can only use arguments in favor and not against, that seems to be the way it is.

[jsanders2001]

I too have known people in the past that were complrtely consumed with smoking marijuana all day long or couldn’t wait until lunch break or until they got home to get high. Anyone who says it isn’t highly addictive haven’t been around true addicts.

[samtheman]

I think you’re right that the tyranny of government would have happened anyway and will happen with or without a wod.

But the wod is just such an easy and convenient tool for maximizing the growth of tyranny in the shortest possible time that I am more against the wod than I am against drugs... which I am against.

[JRandomFreeper]

So, your position is that marijuana should be criminalized with the full force of law by the government?

/johnny

[GeronL]

It is an easy and convenience excuse for the potheads too.

[Olog-hai]

Such people build a quasi-religion around the stuff too. They even seek “converts” to mooch off so that they would not need to spend so much of their own money on the stuff.

[GeronL]

The tyrants do not give a fig about drugs. Heck, they may make them mandatory soon enough in the Brave New World.

[GeronL]

No, that is the position you would like to attribute to someone who does not agree with you.

That is you attempting to put words in someone’s mouth, just after trying to forbid any argument that counters yours as “off topic”.

[GeronL]

Anyone who opposes legal drugs is an infidel that needs smited apparently, so sayeth the worshippers of Green Man.

[samtheman]

I respect you a lot as a poster. Whenever I see your name I look for something interesting to read that I usually agree with. But I don’t agree with you here. I strongly believe that the the WOD is part and parcel to the growth of tyranny in America.

We just have to agree to disagree on this one.

[RginTN]

Personal responsibilty is absent among many these days.

[GeronL]

Yes, those middle-class families who don’t want their children thinking it is A-Okay to smoke mind-altering compounds are the root of all evil.

The potheads and methheads breaking into houses and shooting people and stuff, those are fine fellows. Unlike those average people who oppose drugs and want to raise their children properly, those people are SWINE.

[JRandomFreeper]

Talk about putting words in someone's mouth.

/johnny

[Osage Orange]

M. Brown was walking. Don’t count. / s

[samtheman]

I oppose drugs. I don’t want my children taking drugs. I don’t want drugs in my community. I don’t like the smell of pot in my local park.

But if someone breaks down my door in the middle of the night and I go for my gun, which do I have more to fear from, the meth head who is in for a big surprise or the swat team making a “mistake” at the “wrong door” who’s quite possibly going to blow me away when they see me prepared to defend myself and my family. Meth head? Bring him on. Mis-directed swat team... now that I really fear.

And then, will the city take my house away because I dared touch a gun in the presence of the All Mighty Swat? It could happen. I don’t have to worry about a meth head doing that.

Anyway, as I say, I wish we could just agree to disagree on this.

[dynoman]

I had always heard that but apparently it is a myth;

https://www.google.com/search?q=marijuana+mellow+myth&hl=en&gbv=2&sa=X&as_q=&nfpr=&spell=1&ei=Tep7VO3uOYTLsASKag&ved=0CBEQvwU

[Olog-hai]

It has to be taught in a traditional family. Of course, Marxists are dogmatically against the traditional family, since the Communist Manifesto advocates its abolition.

[chris37]

I have not asked Him to help me help others actually, but I have certainly tried to help others who were addicted to the same drugs as myself, the one that was akin to climbing Mount Everest in terms of kicking addiction to was Xanax, and I failed in those efforts to help others.

I tired to impart to a particular person not only what I learned from beating that addiction but also how I did it step by step, but there has been no success very sadly, my friend is still lost in the forest.

The problem boils down to no matter how much you want to help someone, no matter how much you want to guide someone, you can’t be there for them all the time, only that person can do that duty.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that my friend believes in God, and I am absolutely certain that without my belief in Him, I would no longer be here.

I can’t really stress enough just how amazing it was to on the darkest of days to pray to Him and tell Him that I am utterly lost and to please give me the strength to overcome, and then finding that strength in my body, which should most certainly have ceased living on that very day, to endure a slow walk up and out of Hell.

And that journey did not happen quickly or easily. It took years, and I started to fall back into the pit twice more before I finally walked away.

In the years past that i have really come to love sobriety as the only state of being that matters, because every other state I tried was false.

Hard lessons, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything, this was something I needed to learn the very hard way.