I don’t generally care what people do with their own bodies so long as those actions don’t lead to hurting or even just endangering someone else. For example, I don’t care if you get rip-roaring drunk so long as you don’t do something like get behind the wheel of a car.
With marijuana, it’s more complicated than that.
For one thing, it’s still illegal at the federal level. It’s legal at the state level, leading to a great deal of confusion about what one can and can’t do lawfully.
Then there’s the fact that we don’t really have a good way to test to see if someone is under the influence at that moment. We can use a breathalyzer to see if someone’s drunk, but drug tests just show them in one’s system, not whether they’re under the mind-altering influence of them in that particular moment.
Why am I talking about this?
Because there are issues revolving around gun rights and marijuana. In fact, it seems the Washington Examiner finds itself in agreement with the Biden administration’s motivation on gun control policy in at least one instance even if they disagree with the results.
On marijuana policy, even when the Biden administration faces facts, it uses them for the wrong purposes.
As a result, Second Amendment gun rights are at risk.
…
Before addressing the gun rights milieu, let’s focus on those facts against marijuana. As the Justice Department writes, “Marijuana intoxication can lead to an altered perception of time, short-term memory loss, impaired perception and motors skills, paranoid thoughts, and even hallucinations.” Moreover, “people who use marijuana are more likely to develop psychosis and long-lasting mental disorders, including schizophrenia.” And: “Marijuana use is also associated with depression, thoughts of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicide.” Keep in mind that this comes from an administration pushing for the liberalization of marijuana use.
As we have editorialized numerous times, these conclusions come from a plethora of recent and amply peer-reviewed studies showing that marijuana is a highly dangerous substance and that legalization has led to higher traffic accident rates and increased health problems, including greater cancer risks and worse incidence of mortality. It even has been shown to do damage to human genes.
Yet despite that, the editorial is still critical of the Biden administration’s gun control actions. That’s a perfectly valid position that I’m not going to trip over myself to try and criticize. I’m generally in favor of legalization under the idea that it’s not the government’s job to protect others from their own actions. At most, they should make sure people are aware of the dangers, then let them kill their own brains to their heart’s content.
But the editorial’s overall message, that there’s a great deal of hypocrisy by the Biden administration on the issue marijuana is completely valid and I’m in total agreement. They favor legalization and do nothing to inhibit legal dispensaries in various states, but then when someone who is using it accordance with the state laws the administration has done nothing about wants to exercise their Second Amendment rights, suddenly Biden’s folks are 1990s drug warriors who are ready to throw the book at people.
It’s more than a little hypocritical, especially as many of these same people have claimed they support the Second Amendment. Sure, it’s usually in the context of “I support the Second Amendment but…” Still, though, they say it then do this, which really shows you just how much of a lie that is.
