I submitted this because the overall discussion about legal cannabis is interesting, the author makes (what I think are) reasonable points and I find myself wondering whether going directly from illegal to legal, without first broadly decriminalizing it, was the right move. That said, I also looked up where The Dispatch falls on the political spectrum and it's certainly right-leaning, which makes sense given the tone of the article, but for those who tend to reject anything right-leaning I still think the topic is a good one to discuss.
Were you looking for a point-by-point refutation of how asinine it is? I haven't got all day.
"Legalization is consistently associated with increases in hospitalizations from marijuana-related conditions"
Duh. The more of a thing happens, the more the bad things happen too. He's not even pretending to think of it as a trade-off.
"At 1,400, the number of marijuana-related road deaths is still fewer than those attributable to alcohol"
The switch from "related" to "attributable" is designed to exaggerate -- even when he's acknowledging that it's already not a problem. "Related" just means "somebody in one of the cars was high", not "caused an accident", which is exactly what "attributable" means.
"the Biden administration’s recent move to reclassify marijuana as a less-dangerous drug, which is mostly a giveaway to the state-legal industry"
Allowing a business to proceed is a "giveaway"?
Not a single one of the points is "reasonable". It's just them repeating the predictable ideology. There's nothing for anybody to learn here, except a reiteration that partisan media gonna partisan.
Also, I'm not sure that changing the treatment of non-research-related marijuana possession and sale from "a federal crime we choose not to enforce in specific circumstances" to "a federal crime we choose not to enforce in specific circumstances" even qualifies as a meaningful change in how much you are "allowing a business to proceed".
(It does make research use easier legally, but that's not the same as state-legal sales to the public, whether medical or recreational.)
