The original draft of this email was sent to Glenn Kessler, “The Fact Checker” at the Washington Post, known for issuing up to four Pinocchios depending on the severity of the whoppers told by politicians and other mostly public figures who involve themselves in America’s political and policy debates. Compared to most of his colleagues since they’ve fallen under the hyperpartisan yoke of gazillionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos, Kessler does a fairly evenhanded job. But when he errs, he tends to err against Republicans, heaping on an extra Pinocchio or two, as was the case Sunday when he criticized the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate in Virginia for saying that related tax-revenue projections for states that legalize marijuana tend to be higher than reality.
Dear Glenn,
If Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin (R) hasn’t yet made the costs of legalized-marijuana a part of his critique, I can’t be too hard on you for ignoring them, too [“Youngkin is far off the mark on states’ tax hauls from marijuana,” A4, July 11]. But it seems to this objective observer that any meaningful analysis of states’ weed legalization “revenues” should look at the question “on net,” meaning that new related state spending should also be considered.
For example, even before the pandemic reduced highway traffic and encouraged reckless speeding, marijuana states experienced significant upticks in car crashes, some fatal and all costly with respect to emergency response, medical care, insurance payouts and rising premiums — all functioning as drags on state economies.
Not coincidentally, legal-weed states also seem to have become magnets for the self-medicating homeless. In the decades before the political left indignantly forced closures of state psychiatric hospitals, dirty barefoot hippies were an occasional problem (see Woodstock and the Haight) but not on the disastrous, plague-like scale the mentally-ill homeless have now become, ruining once family-friendly parks; creating or adding to public health crises with open-air needle use, urination, defecation, etc.; and crashing property values for sane, law-abiding urban dwellers whose environments are quickly becoming unlivable. Meanwhile, the Associated Press is reporting that Denver’s Mayor Michael Hancock, a Democrat, is now under attack by damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t progressives for having the audacity to clear homeless encampments away from Coors Field in advance of MLB’s Tuesday night All-Star Game.
And it’s too early to tell, but it’s at least possible that legal-weed states will in ensuing years deal with increasing and costly problems related to juvenile drug use, including already rising youth suicides, as the stigma of “illegal” drug use disappears and everyone’s favorite gateway drug becomes ubiquitous.
I cite all of this not as an anti-weed prude but as one who became a legal adult in the late-1970s when recreational use of illicit drugs peaked in the U.S. The illegality and threat of punishment no doubt tempered my peers’ usage and, I’d argue, kept many of us from getting carried away, losing ourselves in downward drug spirals and becoming lifelong burdens to society, like the hapless folks being forcibly moved away from Coors Field.
None of which necessarily argues against incremental decriminalization of marijuana use by responsible adults in the closed-door privacy afforded them by the Fourth Amendment. But if you’re going to give Mr. Youngkin three Pinocchios for talking like a commonsense dad who’s old enough to have been there and done that, you ought to have enough journalistic integrity to acknowledge some of the ambiguities and obvious costs that states surely incur with full-scale legalization of weed — even as Mr. Youngkin should do a better job of citing those costs himself.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.