Stoned: How Colorado's 5 Years of Legal Pot Is 'Devastating Communities'

CBN News ^ | 11-21-2017 | Dale Hurd

[aquila48]

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[Sergio]

bkmk

[little jeremiah]

Where ever mj is legalized, other drug use goes up. OR is getting ruined now. Huge increase in meth and heroin along with increased mj dopers, and of course homelessness, crime, and so on and so forth.

It’s a lie that people switch from other drugs to mj if mj is legalized. It just means a positive drug culture - wheeee it’s all good! more drug use. Oh, and more prostitution, too.

[x]

Assuming the reports are true, are these just the people who'd be homeless or criminal in some other state anyway, and decided to move to Colorado?

Or are they marginal people who dropped out of life to move to a state where pot was legal and ended up on the streets?

In that case, when other states legalize, maybe some of the offenders or troublesome people might just move back where they came from.

Or is it really the case that Coloradans are giving up their jobs (or not getting jobs) just to enjoy the pot (which they still have to pay for somehow)?

In other words, assuming the reports are true, is people's behavior really changing drastically or are people who behave in a certain way relocating to a state where it's more convenient for them?

[Mariner]

“It’s far more detrimental to society than pot.”

As far as I can tell, all the homeless here in California are drunks first. And primarily.

[minnesota_bound]

George Soros and the democrat party want this.
A stoned hippie is a democrat forever.

[bluejean]

I live in Colorado Springs, CO - and the vagrants are everywhere. But I wonder if several years of mild winters have anything to do with the problem. They can find pot on the black market, from street dealers, etc. In my partying days in the 70’s there was no problem finding pot if you wanted it. That’s probably still true.

A bitterly cold, snowy winter might make these beggars go back to Frisco. We’re at 74 degrees today. We’ve had weeks of mild temps. No snow or real cold in the forecast for another 10 days it looks like.

[DiogenesLamp]

Stoned: How Colorado's 5 Years of Legal Pot Is 'Devastating Communities'

Now you've gone and done it. Watch the "Libertarians" come out of the woodwork to denounce you and your article!

[Responsibility2nd]

“It’s far more detrimental to society than pot.”

As far as I can tell, all the homeless here in California are drunks first. And primarily.

 

The reason I say weed is not as detrimental as alcohol is because marijuana is illegal. And so is used far far less than booze.

Just guessing on my part, but if marijuana and alcohol were equally legal and used in equal amounts, we'd be in deep deep (obama) with the dope problems in this country.

[DiogenesLamp]

Legal Marijuana was inevitable the moment Alcohol was legalized. Even Americans can’t put up with that level of hypocrisy. Though God knows we gave it a good try.

One of the things you can always count on is Libertarian attempts to make prohibition = drug war.

Alcohol has been with humanity for 10 million years. We've evolved to process it. It is part of many cultures and long accepted in Human history.

This ditch weed stuff is by contrast a far more recent event in western culture.

[DiogenesLamp]

For better or worse, I see Colorado as the canary in the coal mine.

The utter mess that is California was not a good enough canary?

[DiogenesLamp]

We were there before and after legalization of pot. What a huge difference we noticed after legalization. There were groups of 20-somethings begging on street corners. In Durango, really? One of the store owners told us that people just started to show up and some even started sleeping in their store doorways. While the owner was generally for legalization, she was shocked how many people just flooded to Colorado and she believed they didn’t think about getting jobs to pay for their pot. Jersey is next — an uglier version of Colorado.

And the Venezuelans are utterly shocked that communism has left them starving and impoverished. They just didn't see it coming.

[DiogenesLamp]

Freedom

Is under assault by drug lunatics who will wreck society and make us all less free.

[DiogenesLamp]

I, of course, refer to alcohol. It’s far more detrimental to society than pot.

Not a reasonable statement. We have no idea what would happen to society if pot usage was on the level of alcohol usage.

[fwdude]

Only, pot is never really "legalized." What was once a half-dozen pages of code to criminalize pot outright becomes a few thousand pages to manage the fallout of legalizing it. In many ways it becomes MORE illegal.

[DiogenesLamp]

And then people argue back and forth, with libertarian types saying they have the right to use any substance they want, and nanny staters have no right to restrict them. Then others say that marijuana use/abuse imposes great social costs on all of us, and thus such use should not be legal for those reasons.

I say look at the history of China between 1840 and 1960. This experiment has already been tried.

[DiogenesLamp]

You might want to look at the recent election results... more states are saying "yes", every cycle.

And more and more millennials are saying they like socialism.

People are getting stupider with each passing year.

[DiogenesLamp]

Colorado's real estate market has also been absolutely booming during that same time period. Perhaps a lack of affordable housing may play a role?

Lunatic Californians leaving the mess they created in California and traveling to a new state to mess it up too.

They are like locusts, but with money.

[fwdude]

I’m completely against recreational drug “legalization” but am a staunch federalist about the issue. It should be handled by and in the individual states, not federally.

But there is a real hazard to a patchwork of states allowing it to some degree. States have margins, in which people living there often live in two worlds. What if a person lives in a state straddling city, working in one and living in another? This is a frequent condition. The cross-border risks of criminality when pot is legal in one and criminalized in another is a very real dilemma.

As long as there is no encroachment or demands on a criminalizing state by a neighboring legalized state, I’d be okay with it.

[kanawa]

It’s far more detrimental to society than pot.

I got sucker punched in the gut by the Catholic High School Principal/Priest for suggesting that was true. 1968