Voters in states including Michigan and Ohio will be voting in the next couple elections whether to legalize marijuana in their states. This issue is sweeping the nation right now, beginning in 2012 with the states of Washington and Colorado. I am from Washington, and I have also had the experience of volunteering as an attorney with the Four Cities Youth Peer Court. About half the cases we heard were possession of marijuana charges for youth ages 11-17. All but two of the students charged with possession had used the drug multiple times, and I’ve seen first-hand the pain marijuana use brings to youth and to their families.
Most proponents of the new legalization movement argue that youth will remain uneffected because it will still be illegal for anyone younger than 21. True, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have effects on the children. And the whole society is worse for it.
To begin, some statistics on how the Colorado marijuana laws have affected the state: traffic fatalities involving marijuana have increased 100 percent, even while overall traffic fatalities have decreased. The majority of DUI arrests involve marijuana and crime in Denver has increased by 6 percent since marijuana was legalized.
In Washington, about 10 percent of youth (ages 12-17) were using the drug in 2012, compared to the national rate of roughly 7 percent. Marijuana-related exposures for children 0-5 years have increased by a full 268 percent.
It hasn’t been that long since Colorado passed their law. Some of this data includes years when the only legal marijuana was medical marijuana. Making it a legal recreational drug has only made things worse.
One of the more popular forms of recreational marijuana is edibles — unfortunately, the hardest to regulate. Marijuana cookies label the serving size as one-sixth of the cookie. But children and pets who find the cookie are not likely to eat just a sixth. (Of course not. Who eats a sixth of a cookie?)
But more than this, what is the message we are sending the youth? Here at Hillsdale we often have discussions as to whether certain laws are just and how we determine what justice is. But to most people, if it is legal, it is moral. After all, the state just wouldn’t legalize something bad.
We continue to tell the youth that it is bad for them to smoke marijuana. After all, it has bad effects on their brains, and it’s not good for kids to use drugs. But then they see that the culture thinks marijuana is fine — after all, it’s legal. This conflicting message is causing more and more youth to use marijuana, leading many to do more (and often more illegal) drugs.
It’s time we did something about this. Drugs are harmful, no matter who uses them. And all of society is affected for the worse when marijuana becomes legal. So take a stand against this dangerous trend in our society, and vote against marijuana legalization.