Speaking to rich people at the Aspen Institute, chronic meddler of people’s affairs and former mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg blasted Colorado for ending the prohibition on weed and regulating it like its more dangerous counterparts, tobacco and booze. Bloomberg had this to say about the measure that has allowed police to focus on more serious crimes and raise much needed revenue:
“What are we going to say in 10 years when we see all these kids whose IQs are 5 and 10 points lower than they would have been?” he asked. “I couldn’t feel more strongly about it, and my girlfriend says it’s no different than alcohol. It is different than alcohol. This is one of the stupider things that’s happening across our country.”
As for the reduced IQ, there’s no science to support that. And yes Mike, weed is different than alcohol — way different. For one, you can’t die from an overdose of pot, but you can die from alcohol poisoning and many people do. There are also a lot more alcohol-related deaths and more people treated for alcohol addiction than for weed. According to the National Institute of Health, nearly 90,000 people “die from alcohol related causes annually, making it the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States.” That amounts to about six alcohol deaths a day. The U.S. Department of Justice statistics claim that “alcohol plays a role in one in three cases of violent crime.”
Apart from the glaring differences between the amount of harm that booze causes compared to weed, Bloomberg is hardly the poster child for effect drug policies. Under his administration, the NYPD routinely abused stop-and-frisk searches and New York’s 1977 law decriminalizing pot to garner record-setting amounts of arrests for low level pot possession, especially among blacks and Hispanics. Cops were misusing the law so badly that then-commissioner Ray Kelly had to issue a memo reminding cops to obey the law.
This is also the same Mike Bloomberg who said, “You bet I did, and I enjoyed it,” when asked if he ever tried smoking weed in 2001, when he was still running for mayor.
In 2012, 1.3 million Coloradans overwhelmingly voted in an referendum to legalize weed. In that same year, the NYPD spent tens of millions of dollars to make made 39,218 low level weed arrests that cost nearly 100,000 man hours and it’s Colorado voters who are the stupid ones?
(Photo: Andrew Mager)
