Legal pot proves no big deal, in Nevada and elsewhere. A harrumphing New Jersey Democrat raises old terrors anyway.By Yours Truly
https://www.themaven.net/theresurgent/community/reefer-madness-the-next-generation-GUyiMEQjXEOAtbBe6uRAbA/If you don't count the periodic scolding from the nation's attorney general,
who thinks he's a qualified physician in hand with being
an underqualified law enforcement official, it seems like only yester-century that marijuana provoked hysterics able to square tall circles in a single bound. A little over a year ago, the state in which I live and work, Nevada, legalised marijuana all the way to recreational availability.
And a funny thing happened when it did---nothing.
The sun still arose. The summertime heat still remained enough to tempt the energy saving cooking of breakfast on the driveway surface. The slot machines in the casinos continued to chime, jingle, jangle, explode, and squeal. The Fremont Street Experience continued to host its assorted demimonde buskers in their assorted states of dress (or undress, as the case might be). And there was no appreciable intrusion from the high to the streets. Nevada did not become a Cheech & Chong reality show.
There were also no unduly swollen increases in the incidences of driving while intoxicated. In fact, it seems the opposite happened. From marijuana's full Nevada legalisation (1 July 2017) through 1 May 2018, according to the state Department of Public Safety, traffic deaths fell by 33 from the toll of July 2016 through May 2017. The cynic might suggest Nevadans simply don't have the kind of predispositions to mayhem that infuse larger populations, but the evidence is at least as powerful as a pot smoke.
Nevada's tax collectors partied hardily, too, if you'll pardon the expression. From 1 July through 31 December 2017, according to the
Las Vegas Sun, legal marijuana provided over $35.9 million, thanks to the marriage of a fifteen percent wholesale tax for medical and recreational marijuana and a ten percent excise tax on the recreational stuff. The wholesale tax proceeds go to pay for state and local governments' regulation of the pot business, presumably, with what remains going to the state's distributive school fund; the excise tax proceeds go into the state's (don't laugh) Rainy Day Fund.
Perhaps the only noteworthy thing about Nevada's plunge out of the War on Drugs, Marijuana Front, was that for the first two weeks or thereabout of the legal dispensaries' openings, the lines to get in even in the dead of night (if it's not a stretch to say Las Vegas has any such thing as a dead of night) were long enough to provoke memories of waiting to see the exhibits and pavilions of the New York World's Fair 1964-65. The lines wrapped twice around the buildings at minimum, so it seemed when you passed them by.
Go into one and the first thing you'll be asked is for your identification. Just as you will when you slip into a convenience store to buy cigarettes. (Being carded is first degree flattery at my age.) Don't even think about bringing a minor to the dispensary with you; don't even think about buying a small haul and handing some to the minor agreeing to wait outside. There are casinos on the Las Vegas Strip whose security isn't that tight, even if the dispensaries' security are not terribly intrusive or obvious.
There are also no legal public facilities for having a toke or a bong outside your home, but it doesn't exactly seem to be as desperate a lacking as is, say, a coherent federal immigration policy. Tourists visiting Nevada can't have it in their hotel rooms, however, and all states that have legalised recreational marijuana are wrestling with ways to solve that issue, a dilemna illustrated last winter by Nevada state senator Tick Segerblom (D-Clark County): "This is what we spend millions of dollars on: Come here because you can’t do it back home. Then you say: Oh by the way, you can’t do it here." Unless you're visiting friends or relatives.
Whether New Jersey state senator Ronald Rice is aware of such things may be open to question. As his legislature ponders a bill to legalise recreational pot in the Garden State, the Newark Democrat talks like a man whose bucket list includes starring in a remake of
Reefer Madness. Or some other such
vintage propaganda film in which marijuana is
the demon seed liable to blow all remaining social decorum, ahem, up in smoke.
"(I)f we legalize recreational marijuana,"
Rice told NJTV, "right across the street from my office they're going to put up stores. They want to call them dispensaries. They're going to be stores that do retail selling of cupcakes with marijuana, candies with marijuana, sex toy oils with marijuana, lipsticks with marijuana—all those kinds of products that kids can get and people can get." The better to eat you with, granny.
"Kids can get," I get, though the official mischief committed on behalf of saving the kids would fill at least as many pages as does the incumbent volume of American federal and state laws making government the nation's biggest public nuisance. The dispensaries' security should and does dispose of the kids in the candy store (ho ho ho) readily enough. And the kids can't just window shop the dispensaries, either, because there's nothing in the windows to see; the wares for sale are recessed far enough out of clear window sight. These are not your friendly, neighbourhood bakeries with the calorie-swelling window displays.
"People can get," I don't get. The pot candies and cupcakes aren't liable to give anything past a small buzz, unless you wolf down a six-pack of the cupcakes or a twelve-portion candy bar in one sitting, if your sweet tooth is that insatiable. Isn't gnashing over pot-spiked erotic lubricants or lipsticks among consenting adults (married and otherwise) just a little modern reefer madness? (Fair disclosure requires that I say I've never seen a marijuana lipstick, but then I'm just not that kind of guy.) Assuming the THC dose is sufficient enough to make the difference, would we face an epidemic of kissing bandits trying to get the unsuspecting stoned?
All Sen. Rice omitted was the terror of pot in every chicken. The temptation here is to ask, with all due respect, "Senator, are you high?"