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Decriminalizing marijuana, we’ve been told to the point of stupor for years, would simply be a matter of recognizing the way society has changed and coming to a mature accommodation of a widespread current practice. It would free up valuable police resources to deal with actual crimes and real criminals, and end a longstanding injustice in which — you guessed it! — people of color were, we were told, disproportionately targeted for arrest and prosecution. So the state of New York has legalized marijuana, and how’s it going? Doritos and Patchouli oil sales through the roof? Maybe. But there have been a lot of unexpected downsides.
The New York Post reported last Monday that “the Sunday night murder inside a Harlem ‘smoke shop’ near the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard — the second shooting in the neighborhood in the last year — is a savage reminder of the state’s stupendously disastrous legalization of marijuana.” It seems that the state went about the legalization by “virtually eliminating the entire criminal code pertaining to marijuana overnight.” Making matters even worse, “progressive state lawmakers, besotted by a woke vision of the pursuit of equity, decided to reserve the first retail licenses for felons and other ‘justice-involved’ individuals.” They wanted to make legalized marijuana “a vehicle for reparations.” Great idea!
The state has been slow to grant licenses to legal marijuana shops, however, so illegal ones have proliferated, and cops can do little or nothing to stop them, “because having weed on open display isn’t against the law — the cops have to be present to witness a sale in order to issue a violation.” But these places also often sell other illegal drugs and quickly become centers for other crimes as well. There has been “a sharp rise in robberies targeting illegal smoke shops around the city. There were 251 violent robberies in 2021, and more than double that number in 2022. This year, robberies are up another 10%.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has declared: “This cannabis stuff is a real problem!” He has, however, done nothing about it and insisted that it’s the state’s problem. Yet the city has plenty of problems of its own that arise from the legalization, and they aren’t all related to crime. Another unexpected byproduct of the proliferation of grass inside Gotham has been that the City That Never Sleeps has become the City That Always Sleeps. The Post’s Steve Cuozzo observed Sunday that all too many city stores are staffed by stoners who can barely understand, much less fulfill, customer orders.
“A license to get high,” Cuozzo says, “has turned service employees into zombies.” He adds: “I’ve lived in the city nearly all my life. I never had to repeat my highly complex Starbucks order — a ‘tall’ coffee — three times to get a response from the bummed-out barista, the way I do now.” He says that he now regularly encounters service workers who are “stoned up the wazoo, hollow-eyed, disengaged from their tasks, their breath reeking of weed.” This makes what used to be routine transactions into unpredictable adventures.
Cuozzo recounts: “I gave a guy at Pret a Manger a $20 bill for an $8 cup of soup. I asked for a bag. He took the $20 and promptly forgot the soup, my change, the bag — and me. He wandered off, inexplicably waving my Andrew Jackson like a flag, until I appealed to his colleagues.” He quotes a bank executive recalling that at a gourmet food shop, the cashier was “so out of it, staring into space while people waited in line. She forgot to give me my change. She closed the register. I had to wait for someone to come with the dreaded key. After ten minutes for a 30-second transaction, she didn’t even apologize.” Why should she apologize? She is the wave of the future, a citizen of the new nation, diverse, equitable, multicultural, and enlightened. She is the twenty-first-century American.
But reading Cuozzo’s stories raises the inevitable question: is it possible that earlier generations actually had a point in keeping marijuana and other drugs illegal? Did they realize the societal dysfunction that legalizing such substances could cause, and opted instead not to make it so easy for people to turn themselves into barely functioning messes? Is it time for America to realize that the “progressives” are taking us to a society that is unlivable in all kinds of ways and that some regress is now in order?
Not that I have anything good to say about islam but I was recently in muslim-majority Malaysia for a vacation with friends, an odd place for me to visit. When you see the mess of drugged up, addicted, homeless, lazy, unemployed and criminal all over the cities of the USA and increasingly in Canada it is pretty pathetic and no doubt has a lot to do with two things. Drugs and socialism. Go to Malaysia, through several cities and towns and countryside and you don’t see beggars, homeless camps, even criminals. Same I saw years ago in Vietnam, an ostensibly communist country. These places don’t worship a drug culture. They take a hard line. Thus this is not an issue. Place was as safe as you could ever imagine. Everyone was working. This is not just about the muslim majority there, but the Chinese Christians are quite conservative everywhere. Work and getting ahead are the foci, not getting stoned.
Simply allowing drugs to be considered harmless is part of the decline of Western civilization. Used to be hard work. Now it is hard drugs.
Malaysa’s neighbor Singapore is reputed to be even more straight-laced. It seems like a pretty civilized place to live.
The Netherlands already discovered that statistical factoid long before most Neanderthals but they didn’t publicize it for the benefit of Neanderthals who think they’re blazing some sort of new Netherlands trail.
Maybe you need to need to rediscover what you’re discovering in an American context?
Ever since Trump that funded Democrats his whole life and is still totally mystified as to why they hate him, this is what we have.
Saul savagely persecuted Christians; then, “on the Road to Damascus,” he underwent a miraculous Conversion, and became one of the greatest Christian saints.
That’s why I don’t hold Donald Trump’s past as a liberal playboy against him, nor should anybody: Trump underwent Conversion, too–to common sense, love of America and dedication to our survival, and the courage to fight FOR us instead of going along with our enemies, even at the cost of his own martyrdom.
If it’s not working in the Netherlands it’s most definitely not working with you but that assumes it’s meant to work.
Everything old is new apparently
As the old Anti-Drugs ad from the 1970’s went WHY DO YOU THINK THEY CALL IT DOPE?
I…uh…forgot what I was going to say…
The Genie is kinda, sorta, out of the bottle.
CNBC, Fox Business, Discovery Channel, Vice Channel, et.al. have already staked their territory.
Doesn’t Jim Belushi have a new season of his “hit” show Growing Belushi?
Maybe a new episode of Joe Rogan and Elon Musk burnin’ a fatty will elucidate.
https://youtu.be/kP52kVPpx2o (Clarence Thomas on legalization)
The issue is more than just government regulated and controlled marijuana. Once upon a time if you showed up drunk at your job, you would be fired.
Why aren’t these potheads being fired like drunks would be fired in the past? Are alcohol dependent baristas and clerks also not being fired and keeping their jobs? If so then the cultural change is wider than just government regulated marijuana.
Liquor stores have always been and still are prime and favored businesses for robberies but Spencer leaves that out.
Did you ever have a job? How would you know who gets fired and for what reasons?
Just wait and see….
The next step will be a firestorm of lawsuits by “stoners” and junkies against employers’ “zero tolerance” and “random and probable cause” testing as “unConstitutional.” No doubt vehemently supported Soros fronts and every Democrat in office–no doubt as “Racist!”
In my job, we’re subject to Random and Probable Cause D&A testing under DOT Rules, and none of us object.
Why would we? None of us show up to clock-in drunk or stoned, either.
Legalized gambling has been just as great and idea as the legalized dope. These things always come in with the promises of great wealth, but at who’s cost?
Better book a flight to Las Vegas and see…. HUGE investment in the recreational weed market. Google Planet 13.
In Olden Times (just 75 years ago, or even less), a wife with a sharp tongue, a strong arm, and a good cast iron skillet knew how to deal with a husband’s gambling or drinking Problem.
But that was Then; this is Now.
Now, hardly anybody bothers to get married (or sees Marriage as a serious, monogamous commitment for Life, enforced by the fear of Hell), there are a lot fewer strong women like that to keep order in the family than there used to be.
Yeah, that sharp tongued wife with the skillet just cracked Hubby in the skull and all the addiction issues vanished, eh?
Sorry Lib Troll. You’re unmasked.
Hunter loves the stuff.
Your son is also retarded enough to be partial to parmasean cheese, and even more retarded to tell everyone.
But, hey . . . Xi’s checks are clearing. and laws that’d land me in prison are being discarded on his (and your) behalf. Spend wisely.
Half the problem is the right wing seem to think that people should be free to make whatever choices they like. This doesn’t help as it quite clearly damages others, including children, but selfish behaviour is the inevitable result of low morals.
Ah yes, the man who seeks to control and enslave others by the initiation of government force is one of the most selfless and altruistic of all. The man who seeks to force others to think and act like he does is the most selflessly “noble” creature on earth just look at Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Pol Pot.
The selfless man has no self to speak of so he must live through other men who do have a self and control them and live through them. Like a vampire does with his victims.
Sounds like you are describing yourself.
So is it ok for the selfish drug users to damage their families and children in their neighbourhood?
A morally legitimate government may not INITIATE force against an individual who has not initiated force or fraud against another person or his property.
If an alcohol (alcohol is a drug) or a drug user initiates force or fraud against someone else, including his family, if he damages someone else’s property, if he is drinking, or smoking, or drunk or high in public, if he is a nuisance disturbing the peace, then the government should and must step in and use retaliatory force and punishment against that individual. It is also perfectly just to punish the offender extra hard for his intoxication and forcing him to go to rehab. It is just to take away his car or vehicle, etc. It is just to add extra time for a crime committed under the influence of intoxication.
But a proper, legitimate, moral government may not prohibit the peaceful, private, use of alcohol or drugs, itself, as a crime. When you possess or use a drug peacefully in the privacy of your own home, disturbing no one, harming no one, violating no one else’s rights, the government has no right to stop you or punish you for that.
We all have a fundamental interest in the kind of person we meet in the street…
Without ‘government regulation and control’ utilizing cars and trucks on roads would be utterly impossible… cities and towns per se would at some level of abolishing ‘government regulation and control’ become impossible… So it is not about that primarily… Though deluded potheads love to pretend that that it is to cover their own basically uncivilized attitudes and proclivities…
Forcing people to live with dysfunctional potheads, with degraded manners, lacking basic civic-mindedness and even impulse control by their self-indulgent, intoxicating habit is also a definite form of ‘government regulation and control’…
Most cities have noise ordinances, for example–forcing people to live with unrestrained noise is as much a governmental imposition as is forcing them to limit the time and extent of the noise they make… It always and necessarily cuts both ways entirely…
Cuomo did this to “Fill State Coffers”!!!It’s Filling”COFFINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Turning a simple transaction into a bizarre ritual is how we used to put it. I bet many of these zoned out people are doing other even harder drugs as well, either laced into their pot, or separately.
Nowadays, they don’t have to be stoned to be near useless. Many can’t make change, read a tape measure, ratio to scale quantities in mixtures, and don’t order a half dozen chicken nuggets. You’re likely to be told, in a bored, long suffering voice and expression, that they only come in six, twelve, and eighteen piece boxes. We had an 18 year old in the shop once that didn’t even know how to read a clock with hands. You gotta laugh, at this rate, it’ll take 50, not 500 years to get to “Idiocracy.”
Maybe about 5 years ago or more — I don’t remember — I saw a video on Youtube about a so-called “time traveler” who said that in the future, cities in America would become broken down wastelands with drugged out, mostly young people loitering on the streets or slumped over the curbs or bursting into uncontrollable violent rages. It scared the hell out me and I tried to convince myself it was just a made-up story to get clicks. Well, we now know one part of the story at least is true; let’s hope the sober among us will be able to escape this by either traveling back to the 1950s or far, far into the future when we have finally learned our lessons.
If I wondered into work drunk I’d be fired, why do stoners get a free ride?
The article comes across as “reaching” to support a personal pet peeve.
When your free will ruins society, it is no longer just about your free will.
Lost two friends to alcohol, and two others to drugs. When a close friend cannot get off drugs and jumps off his apartment building in downtown San Diego to his death, I pretty much get sick of hearing people say that taking drugs and alcohol is a personal choice and none of my business. Watching the destruction of these people’s families IS my freaking business.
We as a society, seriously, need to grow the F up. Stop making movies glorifying drugs and drinking. Stop with the “party:” BS. Teach your kids at a young age about hard work, great hobbies, clean and healthy and fun living.
I did that with my son. One is now a millionaire. Makes more money than I do, and he is just 29. My other is a straight A college student. Not because they are better than anyone else, but they completely rejected the drug culture and work very, very hard. My son has already lost former classmates to drugs at his age.
SIck.
There has been a lot of controversy over whether pot is a “gateway” drug. Perhaps we’ll find out in a couple years as more localities legalize it. Personally, I expect to see an increase in “hard drug” overdoses as more people with a proclivity for intoxication find pot just doesn’t do the trick anymore.
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids Dope is for Dopes, Drugs is for Dummies
Calling Sgt. Stedenko!
People who are not free to make bad decisions are not free. Of all the problems in NYC, weed seems pretty low on the list. Anything that keeps the filthy Communists in a stupor sounds like a good idea to me.
I know a woman who is a psychiatrist who worked at a state mental institution. She has said she could not believe they legalized marijuana because it makes users CRAZY. She sees what usage does to people as it can also bring on mental illnesses.
Obama is not only the head of the snake, he’s a pothead, too.
In Columbus, OH, you soon won’t be able to by a menthol cigarette within the city limits, but you can smoke dope, smell like a skunk and blow out you foul-smell vape smoke out your car window as you drive. Just don’t use your cell phone while driving as that’s illegal.
And you can still be called Columbus, but not have a statue of the man.