What Most People Think They Know About Marijuana Is Unscientific, Paranoid and Even Racist Propaganda
And neither mentioned the elephant in the room: the fact that marijuana laws are mainly enforced against black people and that arresting millions and saddling them with criminal records hasn’t prevented around half of the adult population (white and black) from trying weed. It has, however, meant that black people have reduced opportunities to get jobs with organizations like the Times or the Post while Brooks and Marcus never faced arrest.
Conveniently, the columnists also left out the fact that countries like Portugal that have decriminalized marijuana (or countries like Holland that tolerate some commercial sales of marijuana) actually have lower rates of youth drug use than we do.
Meanwhile, Tina Brown also tweeted that marijuana makes people stupid and legalization will reduce our ability to compete with China. Suffice it to say that she has little evidence for such a claim—one might argue based on equally flimsy data that it enhances creativity and popular culture, which is one of our true strengths—but that wouldn’t sound appropriately “serious.”