It’s Not Your Father’s Pot Anymore

Switching out Americans for third worlders and releasing violent predators from prison gave him kicks for a while. But way too many Americans had not yet become McDonald’s-fattened, glassy-eyed deadbeats who spend most of their time sprawled across a filthy couch ordering DoorDash pizza, playing video games and not looking for work.

Legalizing marijuana is the last step, the silver bullet to the heart of what’s left of our country. Tantalize the public with a drug that will turn them into low-IQ losers, crashing cars, committing suicide and rushing to emergency rooms with their cannabis-induced scromiting (uncontrollable screaming and vomiting at the same time — one of the many charming side-effects of widely available pot).

That’s not even the best part. The cherry on top is that a very, very, very small number of corporate magnates with absolutely no conscience stand to make billions. Big Pot will make Big Tobacco and Big Pharma look like your family doctor.

With that kind of money at stake, the pot-legalizers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on pot initiatives this year in Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota so they can start profiting off ruined lives in six more states. According to Open Secrets, the group pushing the Florida pot initiative, “Smart & Safe Florida” — or, more accurately: “Lose 8 Points of Your IQ & Murder Your Wife Florida” — had raised more money than for any other ballot initiative this year, on any issue, in the entire country.

(About my alternative name: One of the first legal pot consumers in America was Colorado’s Richard Kirk, who ate a marijuana edible, started hallucinating, held a gun to his wife’s head and shot her dead.)

That kind of spending could persuade voters to support cannibalism. Which, come to think of it, they might be: Remember Rudy Eugene, the Miami face-eater believed to be high on bath salts? The toxicology report identified only one drug in his system: marijuana.

This column will attempt to provide an eyedropper of truth about pot, against the tidal wave of lies — even, no doubt, from people like Gingrich.

Today’s marijuana is nothing like what it was 20 years ago. Although polls seem to show that younger voters are the most in favor of pot legalization, my experience is the opposite: Older voters who have absolutely no idea what’s in today’s pot are the most susceptible to legalization pitches.

The oldsters think marijuana is still about 2% to 3% THC. Maybe when they were listening to the Beatles’ “White Album” in their dorm rooms, but currently, pot averages about 15% to 25% THC and can be 99.9% pure. That’s a completely different drug.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that about 30% of cannabis users will become addicted, especially those who start before the age of 18. Brain scans of regular users are consistent with the brain circuitry of an addict.

The corporate interests behind legalization are pushing a fairy tale about how legalization will swell a state’s tax coffers. Marijuana’s been legalized in 24 states (and another 17 for “medicinal purposes” — a total fraud). Are they rolling in tax revenue?

Quite the opposite. For every dollar in marijuana taxes a state collects, it spends about $10 on increased hospital admissions, police to clean up after all the car crashes and psychosis-induced crimes, and mental health therapists to deal with suicide ideation, depression and anxiety caused by increased cannabis use.

The corporate interests pushing pot claim it works wonders on veterans with PTSD. Yes, if you consider suicide a cure. Two studies have shown that cannabis use by veterans was associated with “PTSD severity, depressive symptom severity, and suicidality.”

As one psychiatrist said, “You can’t trust the people who sell the drugs to be upfront with the risk.”

The main upshot of legalizing pot will be to accelerate our nation’s galloping descent into mass retardation, laziness and the inability to engage in a normal adult conversation.

It’s basically impossible to increase IQ permanently — as Charles Murray has been pointing out forever. But Soros has found a way to decrease IQ permanently.

The 2012 Dunedin Study compared the IQ of more than a thousand participants at age 13 and then again at age 38, with their pot usage assessed at ages 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38.

Result: The more pot they consumed, the more IQ points they lost. Heavy, frequent or longtime users lost an average of six points, and early-onset users lost an average of eight points. Mental impairment was evident across all four Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV components: working memory, processing speed, perceptual reasoning and verbal comprehension. The cognitive loss was even greater compared to non-users, whose IQ actually increased from childhood.

No other factors could explain it — the researchers controlled for alcohol, education level, other drugs or still being high. It was just the marijuana. And quitting didn’t reverse the decline, especially for users who started young. Once the IQ points are gone, they’re gone. You can’t Uber down to the IQ dispensary and buy some more.

Eight points isn’t a gigantic cognitive deficit. It’s only about the IQ difference between Connecticut and Mississippi, or the U.S. and Chile. But why would any country adopt policies that reduce the national IQ by even a few points?

I don’t know. A$k Newt why he campaigned to relea$e thou$and$ of violent criminal$ from pri$on.

     COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER