I was on vacation last week. I know most of you reading this are Americans and so likely unfamiliar with the concept. But yes, in some countries people take days—or even weeks or months—off of work to refresh their weary souls and balance their humors. So I did that. In fact, I did my best to unplug entirely from the work world and, at select times, consensus reality.
I don’t do that much (the voices of my erstwhile Midwestern taskmasters are notoriously hard to silence), so I kind of wondered if I even remembered how to get away from work and relax. But in the end it was a lot like riding a bike, in that I never got past my driveway and was high the entire time.
I bring this up because recreation means different things to different people, and for some Americans it means responsibly enjoying cannabis. While some folks may worry about rampaging hordes of yowling, spaced-out yobbers corrupting the minds of our youth, others think it’s just fine to take the family to Chili’s on a Wednesday night.
But some people—let’s just call them Republicans—are alarmed that Minnesota seems poised to join the growing ranks of freedom states that are making recreational cannabis legal.
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On Tuesday, the Minnesota House approved a cannabis legalization bill 71-59, and on Friday the state Senate passed its own version, along party lines, by a single vote. After the House and Senate hash out their differences, the final bill will go to Gov. Tim Walz, who has promised to sign it into law. The House bill allows Minnesotans to carry up to two ounces of weed in public and grow up to eight marijuana plants in their homes. And that hardly sits well with folks like Minnesota state Sen. Warren Limmer, who describes what he supposes is a future dystopian nightmare but actually sounds a lot like stoner heaven.
Transcript:
LIMMER: “Any person can have eight plants at home. Now, I’ve seen some of the videos of DEA raids. Some of these plants are 8 to 10 feet tall. You can have eight of them. You can have a privacy fence made of these products in your backyard. Two ounces. Just two ounces is equivalent to three joints.”
Wait, it is? I never expected to be saying this when I woke up this morning, but I want to party with Minnesota state Sen. Warren Limmer. Big-time. Because those are some fat spliffs he’s been passing around, yo. Two ounces of weed would last me months. And yeah, I could have eight 10-foot plants in my backyard, but I wouldn’t do much other than look at them—and at the squirrels mysteriously dropping out of trees every 20 seconds like wet coconuts.
Limmer wasn’t the only Minnesota Republican who seems congenitally clueless about marijuana. Here’s state Sen. John Jasinski.
Transcript:
JASINSKI: “I think if this bill passes today in Minnesota, Minnesota is going to go up in smoke.”
Clever! But that hasn’t happened anywhere cannabis has been made legal. In fact, legalization appears to have had little substantive impact beyond fattening governments’ budgets and creating jobs. Notably, Jasinski’s comical anti-cannabis crusades made headlines earlier this year. Less notable? I wrote one of those headlines.
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Meanwhile, as any stoner who’s also been a drinker knows, there’s essentially no such thing as a cannabis overdose, whereas people die every day from alcohol poisoning. So someone please let state Sen. Steve Green know.
Transcript:
GREEN: “You take it to my home where I live and the small community that has five overdoses a week, and that’s just the ones they count anymore that make it to the emergency room, and they figure it’s way more because of the NARCAN pens. And so I hope that you’re listening out there, because this thing is likely going to pass here today, the governor will gladly sign it, and the people at home in their communities are going to have to put a tight ring on what’s going on because their families are going to suffer from this, absolutely. This is a gateway drug. I’ve been around a long time on this Earth and I can tell you, I’ve seen this. I’ve seen it from the time I was a boy when the levels were small, up to today. And it does destroy lives, and it does affect brain growth. Don’t let this fool you out there, that this is somehow some kind of wonderful, only medical procedure that goes on with this, and that it’s not gonna harm anybody, it harms people every day. And people die from this—maybe not directly, maybe directly. But the results of the use this drug are immense.”
Not to get too far into the weeds (see what I did there?), but it would be really hard to conclusively establish that cannabis is a gateway drug. “Correlation is not causation” and all that. After all, it’s hardly surprising that a person willing to use one illicit drug would also be willing to use another. As for overdoses, there’s actually some credible evidence that cannabis legalization could lead to declines in opioid overdoses.
And once again here’s Jasinski, who wants you to know that he’s really worried about people driving under the influence of cannabis, presumably because they could hit an innocent drunk driver like him.
Transcript:
JASINSKI: “We’ve heard time and time again there’s no roadside tests. And I’ll get personal again because you all know about it, it’s been in every newspaper in the state. I got pulled over a couple years [ago] for [an] alcohol-related offense. I tested a .09. So folks, I was one beer over. One beer too many. And I’ve always been very careful about it. There’s a weight scale and how many drinks you can have per hour and what your weight is, and you can go through that and you can kind of see where you’re at. So I was a .09. One beer over. What happens with testing with marijuana? How are they going to know what that percentage is? They don’t have the test for it yet. And yet the effective date of this bill is going to into effect before we have that? It amazes me.”
To be clear, I’m strongly opposed to driving after using cannabis—partly because it’s reckless and partly because I don’t want to go anywhere after smoking anyway, and you can order Peanut Butter Oreos through Instacart now. But to be clear, research indicates using cannabis alone (i.e., without alcohol) and then driving is far, far less dangerous than drinking and driving. In fact, it’s not even close. And this information comes from the same government that has waged a useless and pernicious war on drugs for decades.
Banning cannabis never made any sense, of course—particularly in a country that fetishizes alcohol to the degree that we do. But hey, common sense is in short supply in the GOP these days. Unlike impossibly giant joints, apparently.
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