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Nationwide, marijuana legalization is becoming more normal.
Colorado’s dispensaries are hailed as an economic success story, and other states are following suit—New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has indicated he’ll support legalization after New York City’s choice to gradually decriminalize the drug.
The trend is global: Canada recently joined Uruguay in fully legalizing cannabis, and Lebanon is also mulling legalization.
Marijuana legalization has always had its opponents—including the alcohol lobby, which wants to protect its monopoly on legal intoxicants, and the prison/industrial complex, which fears a decrease in the number of nonviolent drug offenders who keep jail cells full.
Now the reactionaries have another champion athwart history: former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson.
In a pair of op-eds in the New York Times (1/4/19) and the Wall Street Journal (1/4/19) promoting his new anti-marijuana book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence, Berenson—whose main literary success has been authorship of War on Terror fiction thrillers—flipped the news on its head.
Legalization advocates, whom he calls corporate campaigners aiming to set up new businesses for profit, have sold the American people a false image of a perfect and absolutely safe product, and states are taking their cue from them and no one else.
Berenson’s insistence that marijuana is linked to mental illness and violent behavior, as well as to the use of more dangerous drugs, comes with spritely portrayals of pot users who have also committed heinous crimes—“who’d cut up his grandmother or set fire to his apartment.”
In Mother Jones (1/5/19), reporter Stephanie Mencimer conveys Berenson’s research with a tidbit about British colonial officials who chalked up a fifth of mental patients in Raj-era India as victims of pot-related injury.
(Pot-smoking led to “at least one beheading”—if one trusts the public-health expertise of 19th century colonial occupiers, as Berenson seems to.)
Jesse Singal in New York magazine (1/7/19) noted that Berenson’s claims about pot-provoked violence are grounded in egregious cherry-picking.
His Times op-ed asserts, “The first four states to legalize—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—have seen sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults since 2014.”
But as drug policy expert Mark Kleiman told Singal, “Nothing interesting happened with regard to pot in 2014”—it’s just a low-point in the national homicide rate that can be used to create the illusion of a meaningful uptick.
