New York City is Discovering that Legalizing Marijuana Wasn’t Really a Great Idea
Welcome to the Progressive Utopia - with some downsides.
April 20, 2023 by Robert Spencer 39 Comments
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%.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/new-york-city-is-discovering-that-legalizing-marijuana-wasnt-really-a-great-idea/
