By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Denver television station CBS4 reports that Colorado has
seen a sharp spike in marijuana use among teenagers since voters passed
Amendment 64 last November, legalizing recreational use of the drug. As described in The Economist, along with a
Washington State measure also legalizing marijuana, Amendment 64 is “an
electoral first not only for America but for the world.”
That means two American states are to the left of the
Scandinavian countries, Holland, and every other liberal country regarding
marijuana.
CBS4 quotes a number of local high-school students:
“I’ve seen a lot more people just walking down the street
smoking (joints),” high-school student Irie Johnson said.
“In high school it has kind of gotten out of hand,”
student Alaina Tanenbaum said.
According to the CBS4 report, based in part on data from
a local drug-testing lab: “Experts say the test results show that children are
getting higher than ever with alarming levels of THC, marijuana’s active
ingredient, in their bodies.”
The massive increase in both the number of users and the
amount of marijuana used by young people is precisely what I and many others
predicted.
It was easy to foresee.
When something desirable is made easier to obtain, more
people will obtain it. It is difficult to imagine an exception to this
commonsense observation.
So legalizing marijuana is foolish because it leads to
far more use of the drug and the availability of ever more potent forms. But
the foolishness doesn’t end there. Equally foolish is that as a society we have
made peace with marijuana while making war on tobacco. This has been a classic
example of upside-down thinking; and we are reaping exactly what we have sown.
We have produced a generation of young Americans who would never put a
cigarette or cigar near their lips, but who increasingly get high on pot.
Yes, tobacco — specifically cigarettes — kills and
marijuana doesn’t. But, if you’ll forgive the ultimate political incorrectness,
young people would do much better in life if they smoked tobacco rather than
weed.
First, tobacco doesn’t kill young people. When it kills,
it generally kills much older adult people. Moreover, according to a recent
issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, if you stop smoking cigarettes by
age 44, you will lose only one more year of life than a person who has never
smoked.
Second, regular pot smokers increasingly tune out of
life, becoming what are known as potheads, or, to put it bluntly, losers.
Third, as noted in the CBS4 report, “new studies that
have been published say the risk of a car accident increases two-fold after
someone consumes pot.” In other words,
innocent human beings — sometimes whole families — are more likely to be
maimed, paralyzed, and killed by pot smokers than by cigarette smokers.
For myriad reasons, then, I would far prefer my teenager
indulge in cigarettes — not to mention cigars — than pot. Anyone who thinks
that pot is less harmful to a teenager than tobacco is fooling himself — and
his teenager.
If this is not obvious, ponder these questions: Would you
rather your airplane pilot smoke pot or tobacco while flying? How would Britain
have fared in World War II if Winston Churchill had smoked pot instead of
cigars?
In terms of the effects of tobacco and pot on the smoker
while smoking, there is simply no comparison between pot and tobacco.
What the Left has done to America’s youth in the last 40
or so years is so damaging as to be unforgiveable. They have ruined
public-school education; left them with so much debt that they will likely be the
first American generation to live in a fashion materially inferior to that of
their parents; and robbed their innocence with sex-education classes, now
beginning in kindergarten in Chicago and elsewhere. Now they are making
marijuana available to more kids and in greater potency than ever before.
But they have left them with higher self-esteem.
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