Economic growth! Illinois is winning the race to become the capital of the world!

What a weird thing to brag about.

Thanks to JB's leadership, pot and abortions are the two hottest growth industries in the state of Illinois.https://t.co/KWFijQamda

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) January 22, 2024

One of the greatest ironies of the push to legalize pot has been that all the outlandish warnings about how dangerous marijuana is have turned out to be true. Pot really is bad for you, and not just in the “inhaling unfiltered smoke deeply into your lungs” kinda bad, but as in the “you can get schizophrenia from smoking too much pot” kinda way.

Legalizing marijuana is probably the lesser of two evils, but just barely. The war on drugs has been a bust and it makes sense to divert resources used to go after marijuana to more important tasks such as stamping out fentanyl use (that isn’t going so well right now), but it’s hard to deny that the vast increase in the use of marijuana has been a very bad thing.

Living around stoned-out people is degrading for them and for the rest of us, and the widespread use of marijuana has led to a huge increase in the negative externalities that we should have anticipated.

🚨 Important Health Alert 🚨

Dr. Drew raises concerns about recent marijuana studies via @FoxBusiness https://t.co/83CjMiWGOm

The data is extremely worrisome – a 50% increased risk of bipolar and schizophrenia disorders after marijuana use. #MarijuanaStudies #HealthAlert…

— SAM (@learnaboutsam) January 15, 2024

Evidence has been coming in about the connection between marijuana abuse and mental health challenges, and even without that indisputable connection, early experience with legalization has shown that frequent users smoking everywhere or coming to work stoned are a drag on our society.

Of course, alcohol, the use of which is baked into our society, is no peach of a drug either. It kills a lot of people and the world would be much better off if we eliminated its abuse, but experience has proven that is impossible. It has been a core part of society for millennia and isn’t going anywhere. I like a drink or two, just like most people.

Marijuana? Not so much in Western societies. Until now.

Pritzker bragging that the explosive growth of the marijuana industry is a good thing for his citizens is, frankly, insane. Making it legal may be a prudent policy move, but encouraging its use and bragging about it as a good thing sends exactly the wrong message to kids, who are the most likely to be harmed by it.

Some wag did a thought experiment, and he had a point: 50 years ago, we had a society where the drugs of choice were caffeine and nicotine, and we went to the moon, experienced explosive economic growth, and our future was bright. Smoking cigarettes was awful for people individually, but we had a focused and successful society.

Smoking marijuana is bad for you and bad for society. The tradeoff we made was objectively bad for the health of the society, and possibly bad for the individual health of people. We will have to see the long-term effects of mass marijuana use on individual health, which hasn’t been studied much yet at a mass scale, but creating a generation filled with schizophrenics is not a prospect I look forward to.

Liberals have an objectively bad set of priorities. By placing individual pleasure and carnal desires above the objectively true and good, they are destroying society and in the process, making life worse for people–even the people they claim to care deeply about. Liberals care about the poor–but look at the inner cities and tell me that the trillions we have spent to better their lives has been effective. Liberals care about the wretched–but look at what defunding the police has done.

Liberals care about kids confused by the difficulties of puberty–so they condemn them to a lifetime of medicalization and inevitable regret.

If you want to have a toke occasionally that’s OK by me. If you encourage the society to be filled with a bunch of stoners…you are a sociopath.