Chris Christie in no position to slam Colorado on cannabis: Editoria, says New Jersey's Star-Ledger editorial board. Earlier in the week, Governor Christie said he would never approve of medical marijuana because he did not want to see New Jersey's "quality of life" descend to that of Denver's where head shops are springing up all over the place.
"See if you want to live in a major city in Colorado, where there are head shops popping up on every corner, and people flying into your airport just to get high," Chris Christie said on a radio show Monday. "To me, it's not the quality of life we want to have here in the state of New Jersey. And there's not tax revenue that's worth that."
After bitterly noting that if Christie were "truely concerned about quality of life, he would not have sabotaged our medical marijuana program with his foot-dragging, as patients wallow in chronic pain," the Star-Ledger notes a majority of New Jerseyans and even the municipal prosecutors support legalization of marijuana.
A New Jersey lawmaker has proposed a bill that would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana like liquor, predicting we could raise $100 million a year in revenue. That's certainly a big plus. Colorado collected more than $2 million in recreational pot taxes in January.
But the real reason to legalize marijuana is the enormous amount of money and time we are now wasting by treating pot the same way we do heroin or LSD. Our state spends more than a hundred million dollars a year to arrest tens of thousands of people on marijuana charges.
The result of drug laws is not a decline in pot smoking, says the Star-Ledger, but rather just a whole lot of people, especially men of color, with unnecessary criminal records, "crushing their jobs prospects."
The SL sarcastically asks if this is a "high-quality of life," and also asks what would be so wrong with having more tourism. Then, they trash Christie's the argument that Colorado will be overrun with "drug zombies" as bogus because smoking in public, cafes, parks, and bars is still not permitted.
The Star-Ledger says Christie's citation of a recent Journal of Neuroscience study citing alterations in "brain activity" goes up in smoke, as certain parts of the brain also light up when we eat alcohol or eat certain kinds of food.
I agree with the Star-Ledger when they suggest teenagers should not be smoking dope, (their brains are still developing), but they correctly not that when marijuana is illegal it is easier for kids to get than alcohol precisely because it is illegal and creates its own illegal distribution network beyond regulation and control. Proponents of legalization make similar arguments with regard to contaminants, bacteria, pesticides, and dosages. In an illegal market no one really knows for sure what they are getting.
After slamming Governor Christie for saying marijuana will never be legal "on his watch, the Star-Ledger closes by saying:
But all things considered, Denver's looking pretty good to us.
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