The return of reefer madness in the GOP

"We have a drug problem in Virginia, and legalizing marijuana will only lead to more marijuana overdoses and deaths," said state Sen. Amanda Chase (R–Amelia County), who is running for the state's highest office. "Democrats want more marijuana deaths. As your governor I would never allow marijuana to be legalized." Exactly which deaths Chase was referencing remains unclear. In May 2019, a coroner in LaPlace, Louisiana, reported that a woman died from too much THC—the psychoactive compound found in the cannabis plant. It was deemed what could have been the first marijuana overdose death in the history of the U.S., even though some experts refuted that as the cause. "We know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively. Not millions of times, but billions of times a year," Keith Humphreys, formerly a senior policy adviser at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told Nola.com. He noted that coroners sometimes blame a death on a drug found in the system when there is no other obviously apparent reason. "If the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year."