Colorado legalized marijuana back in 2012 with it’s state constitutional Amendment 64. This amendment legalized the recreational and non-medical use of the drug and legalized possession of up to one ounce of it on one’s person, plus the cultivation of up to six cannabis plants for personal consumption.
This amendment was nationally hailed as “progress” by the liberal national media and Democrats in government (and sadly, some conservatives as well), and the bright promise that the tax revenue raised from now-legal sales of this popular drug would be put to good use – ironically, the pot tax revenue would go to fund schools.
Presenting the lies of legalization
Wikipedia’s entry on this amendment goes long on the positive promises that were trumpeted:
…[J]ustifications for support include: increasing the state’s revenue (much of the additional revenue is required to be used to fund primary education),[23] subjecting otherwise illicit substances to health and safety regulations for the protections of users,[24] enhancing individual freedom,[24] eliminating a black market (black markets tend to result in crime regardless of the goods sold because market participants are already criminals, and therefore have less to lose by committing additional crimes),[25] and providing empirical evidence for studying the effects of legalization to identify whether the harms associated with drugs are actually caused by the policy of prohibition.[25]
Yet another argument favoring Amendment 64 is that regulation of marijuana may actually reduce marijuana usage by teens: According to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, the organization responsible for much of the campaigning in support of Amendment 64, marijuana use by teens is likely to go down because commercial access would be limited to persons 21 and older. The campaign also points out that teens who currently seek marijuana have to turn to criminals for their supply and that these criminals may expose teens to other, potentially more dangerous drugs like heroin, meth, or cocaine.[26]
Supporters also point out that Colorado’s experience with medical marijuana supports their conclusion:[27] The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System monitors a number of statistics for America’s youth.[28] The CDC study suggests that marijuana use among Colorado’s youths fell by 2.8 percent from 2009 (24.8 percent) to 2011 (22 percent), while the national rate of youth use increased by 2.3 percent from 2009 (20.8 percent) to 2011 (23.1 percent).[27] Furthermore, the CDC found that the availability of drugs on school grounds in Colorado fell 5 percent from 2009 (22.7 percent) to 2011 (17.2 percent), while the national rate increased by 3.1 percent over the same time.[27]
(Remember these boldfaced numbers because we will see what really happened after legalization, which is NOT widely reported)
The negative views were substantially fewer in number but they were far more serious and weighted in reality:
The group “No on 64” objected to Amendment 64 chiefly because it claimed the amendment would lead to increased use of marijuana, a consequence the group considers harmful. In particular, the group sees marijuana as addictive and as damaging to children because they believe it “permanently affects brain development, impairs learning ability and contributes to depression.”[29]
And now for the truth – What happened?
Well, now my beloved state is a mecca for the degenerates in the US population. In one hotel I stayed at (and not a cheap flea-bitten roach motel either, but the Motel 6 near Denver’s Tech Center, running about $68 bucks a night), I think every single person I saw in the hotel was a druggie. Everyone looked bad, and one man told me that in fact he had driven all the way from Mississippi (about 1,000 miles) to “come to Colorado to get some weed.”
That poor man looked like he was about to fall asleep standing up and he was preparing to drive back to his home state. All I could say was “drive carefully.”
All the others I saw there also looked like the degenerates and dropouts and heads and so forth. I saw not one single normal looking person aside from myself.
In addition, the hotels all across the state have had to get guests to sign agreements not to smoke or otherwise use cannabis on the hotel premises, but this, like the law in the state that still prohibits the public use of marijuana is not an effective policy. At most the hotel might be able to charge people for cleanup if there is smoke in the rooms, but they will just smoke outside – in public. Further, the lack of respect shown by stoned people for anything around them has been visible in Denver for years now. This article, published in 2016, noted that Denver residents were beginning to leave this beautiful city because the homeless population is so much greater now.
“It’s people who feel entitled to live where they want and inconvenience whoever they want. It’s not a good thing. It makes it unsafe for the rest of us.”
Another woman said, “Yep, it is a problem. I run at Cheesman Park, and the homeless use the water fountain to clean up.”
The complaints are not surprising to Jim Hannifin, who has run a temporary employment agency on Colfax Avenue for decades. Hannifin employs many homeless in construction, factory and day labor jobs. He said of the homeless situation, “I’ve never seen it this bad. And it’s getting worse.”
A common thread among these homeless people: they are spending their money getting high, and they do not care where they are and what they do, as the article notes rather graphically. Common occurrences include sex outside in public, people defecating on the sidewalks and just leaving it there, begging, con artistry, bad smelling people, and more.
The 16th Street Mall, one of the most beautiful and luxurious outdoor shopping places in the United States, is now full of homeless people and druggies.
And worse, remember that promise to use the tax revenue from pot for “constructive purposes” (like what, telling kids that drugs are bad for you?) – well, that money has disappeared, apparently no one knows where it went, and the present gubernatorial election campaign by at least one candidate features this fact rather prominently.
And what about those promises of declining use of the drug among the youth? Well…
For kids aged 12-17, already the most at-risk group to acquire addiction to drugs, the pot use is up 20 percent.
It is clear that the CDC must have been imbibing of cannabis themselves to be able to push a stat that is fundamentally irrelevant to legalization of marijuana, because the drug use dropped while it was STILL ILLEGAL!
Liberal logic – you’ve just got to love it, right?
In my trip to the United States just concluded, I was blessed with time and resources (spelled m-o-n-e-y) to get done most of what I had set out to do. One great goal was to spend an appreciable amount of time in my adopted home state of Colorado. Thankfully, my preferences within the state are its small rural communities, plus the richly Christian conservative haven of Colorado Springs. My friends are Orthodox Christians and they as well as my rather traditional family look at drug use with disgust.
This disgust is because as the druggies move into a community, that community literally goes to hell. The problem with legalizing an addictive substance is that people get addicted to it, and they break the law and all social and moral codes because they are only concerned about the high or maybe making money from getting other people high. The law to legalize pot has resulted in more lawlessness regarding pot.
There is a reason why this stuff was classed as a “controlled substance” – even medical marijuana was causing problems because many recreational users faked sickness to get an MM prescription, not now the genie is out of the green smoky bottle and it is destroying a great deal.
I look at this matter with sadness and alarm because of my own life experience. I spent years counseling young teenage addicts to confront their drug use and honestly see – and change from – the way their lives got messed up because of drugs. The majority of these cases involved “only” the use of pot and alcohol.
The increase of crime, DUI’s, shootings, robberies, homelessness, vagrancy, indecent exposure, and even murder are significant.
While the liberals crow about all the money the state is making from tax revenue, they turn a blind eye to all the people they damage and destroy in the process. But many Colorado residents see it in plain sight every day, as do residents of other states where cannabis is legalized, most notably California.
As with so many other things, the liberal press lies to its readers and viewers. Even this video and the newspieces used in corrolary research to document my observations require sifting through to get to the real facts.
Marijuana is NOT just like alcohol. It is NOT a beginner’s drug or a gateway drug. It can lead to harder substances, but it is doing just fine destroying people’s lives all by itself. Of course, Barry Sotero (a.k.a. Barack Obama) was the superdude of spleef, and many parents rue the day that he spoke publicly and said it was no worse than cigarrettes.
But then again, he was President for eight years, and what a change the US took in his time.
One can only hope for a miracle to reverse this process.
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