If We Legalize Marijuana Will More People Use It?

As of now only 4% of the American public believes we’re winning the War on Drugs, and the supporters of prohibition are becoming desperate.

As of late some supporters of the WoD have re-branded themselves as kinder, gentler drug warriors. They don’t want to put you in a cage for smoking pot, they only want to arrest you, send you to a drug court, place you in a rehab you don’t need, and subject you to urine screens. If you fail on of those tests, however, they still want to put you in a cage. I call them “rehabitionists” and the king of them all is former drug czar flack and current TV talking head, Kevin Sabet.

From time to time, we at HIGH TIMES will take one of these rehabitionist’s talking points and expose it to the harsh light of truth. Today, we tackle the supposedly scary proposition that if we legalize marijuana, people will use it.

This proposition is frightening because to the rehabitionist, there is no good use of marijuana. Will more people use marijuana when it is legal? Perhaps, but that stat doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it affects other measures of social wellbeing, too. Do drunken driving fatalities decrease as more people switch to pot? Do prescription overdoses fall as people replace addictive opioid painkillers with medical cannabis? Do cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s rates fall?  Lees meer