According to the latest reports coming out of Colorado, marijuana is a major cause of homicides in the state, and the problem is only getting worse.
Regular readers will know that Colorado has seen a massive increase in crime since it legalized pot. The numbers just keep getting worse. Over the first four months of 2016, total crime in Denver is up 10% over the same period from 2015. This rate of increase is five times the population growth rate and adds to equally large increases in 2015 and 2014, as well as the period in 2013, after which the state government signaled marijuana legalization was forthcoming.
The cops in Colorado knew this would happen. They predicted it, and it has come to fruition.
Now a prosecutor in the state has gone on the record with his concerns. Arapahoe County district attorney George Brauchler provides some disturbing statistics: 10 of the last 15 murders in his jurisdiction were connected to marijuana.
Mr. Brauchler expressed the following to FOX 31 out of Denver:
"There is increased crime, sometimes violent crime, associated with legalization of marijuana," Brauchler said. "That's not what you'd expect. You'd expect the harder-core drugs." ... "If cash is the only way to acquire marijuana, crime follows cash," Brauchler said ... Brauchler believes the legalization of marijuana is partly to blame for the rise in crime. "It is easier for there to be black market in a legalized system than there was before," he said.
This all wasn't supposed to happen. The pot legalization advocates told us that legalized marijuana would reduce crime and effectively eliminate the black market. Now we have experienced and respected prosecutors saying they are seeing, firsthand, the exact opposite.
The legalization proponents overlooked a basic fact that District Attorney Brauchler's comments make clear – you will always require money to purchase pot, whether it is legal or not, and it is that need to acquire currency to procure the addictive drug that is a primary driver of marijuana-related crime.
Legalization will not reduce the need to acquire resources – often illegally – to purchase a drug. In fact, it generally increases the problem, as Colorado is showing. Since marijuana makes users, in non-technical terms, stupid and lazy (note to liberals: this is #science and #fact, aka settled science), the drug thus poses severe challenges toward the acquisition of money via legal means in order to satisfy the corresponding habit.
Thus, legalization functions as a positive feedback loop, making access to the drug easier, getting users hooked, then diminishing their drive and desire to perform socially beneficial work to feed their addiction, thereby resulting in crime to get their fix. This is the Socio-Economics of Drugs 101.
A report by the AAA Foundation released Tuesday found that traffic fatalities involving drivers in Washington where marijuana was involved had doubled between 2013 and 2014. Marijuana became legal in the state in 2012.
Similar trends were observed in Utah, where "officials say the number of fatal car wrecks in Utah in which drivers tested positive for marijuana has more than doubled in the last three years."
This social experiment has failed miserably. Time to recriminalize marijuana in all jurisdictions as a means of minimizing, as best as practical, the damage already done.
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