People paying attention to the development of the cannabis industry know that there are just too many reasons to legalize it to hold up the growth any longer. A survey created by PSB Research, BuzzFeed, Civilized, and Burson Cohn Wolfe showed that 84% of Americans were ready for this 80-odd year ordeal to be over.
In the meantime, conservatives have not broken rank to stand with the ‘personal freedom’ they so claim to champion and just tax and legalize already. Measures in many states (New York comes to mind) have been killed by choosy cons who can’t let the old stigma die—they have too much to lose by changing sides.
This is why you’ll see the power-drunk-teetotaler Trump courting cannabis legalization, because he knows it will win him points with the people who hate him. His vanity is a legendary force, only to be pulled back by republicans who regularly remind him that the big business of private prisons and law enforcement need cannabis to be illegal to continue to capture human lives (mostly Black and Brown) for their criminal justice machine.
Just recently, a human turd of a slightly less orange color than 45, Tucker Carlson—who somehow has a job squawking at senior citizens nightly on Fox News—tried to link cannabis to mass shootings, since one of these white identity extremists had apparently consumed it.
It is soooo deliciously disingenuous that the same blithering fuckwad who won’t tie together white supremacy and mass shootings is more than happy to tie the world’s least dangerous drug to the horrifying deaths that people like him are basically cheerleading.
This mentality keeps the white voter base seeing cannabis as the domain of the leftists, the Black and Latinx community, and overall—the “criminal” like Cointelpro raised them to.
It is this skewing of facts that leads Americans right into opioid addiction and other-ism when less-deadly cannabis could have been helping with that same pain treatment.
The reality peddled by Carlson and his colleagues (many of whom desperately need to tone their Barbie-yellow extensions) disregards American lives in a multitude of ways, and they get paid to muddy the waters. It kills through pushing opioids, allowing mass shootings, cheering for healthcare limitations, but also through police brutality, mistreatment of the incarcerated, and this administration’s penchant for deporting immigrants with cannabis charges to countries with risk to their life and limb.
Advocates have said it before and we’ll say it again: the restriction of cannabis access kills, and if we wait for conservatives to change their mind, we are simply allowing a strain of proto-fascism to grow unchecked. Indifference is, in this case, deadlier than we ever knew possible.
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