Vice President Kamala Harris recently told The View she couldn’t think of a single thing she would have done differently than President Joe Biden. But she has finally found something with which to distance herself from the unpopular incumbent. Her stroke of genius is to propose making it easier for black men to become drug dealers.
Faced with polls showing historically high percentages of black men intending to vote for former President Donald Trump and not the Democratic Party nominee, Harris unveiled an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” on Monday. In addition to wildly unconstitutionally racist proposals, such as providing $20,000 grants available only to black entrepreneurs, the flailing Democratic nominee called for federal legislation that would legalize the “cultivation, distribution, and possession of recreational marijuana” nationwide. Harris said this legislation would make sure black men “are able to access wealth and jobs in this new market.”
While the Biden administration has moved to liberalize federal marijuana policy, such as by having the Drug Enforcement Administration start the regulatory process for reclassifying marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug, the president has not pushed for full legislative legalization. Harris has now taken that extra step. Like so many of her terrible hard-left policies, her push for marijuana legalization looks like a much worse idea now than it did five years ago.
As more states have legalized recreational marijuana use, studies reveal uniformly bad consequences. There is growing evidence from peer-reviewed studies that regular marijuana use impairs cognition, shrinks the brain’s hippocampus and causes other brain damage, increases depression and suicidal thoughts, increases incidents of suicide, and boosts the risk of heart attacks by 25% and strokes by 42%.
The New York Times, not a bastion of conservative criminal justice views, conducted its own review of drug use survey data and found that nearly a third of marijuana users aged 18 and up have reported symptoms of disorder. Of that 18 million, about 3 million are addicts. The results of marijuana addiction can be devastating, the New York Times notes, producing symptoms including “delusions, paranoia and … psychosis.”
The Biden administration has admitted in federal court, as part of a larger effort to restrict the Second Amendment rights of drug users, that “marijuana intoxication can lead to an altered perception of time, short-term memory loss, impaired perception and motor 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.”
Harris’s policy for black men would mean more depression, psychosis, and suicide.
As bad as Harris’s push for marijuana legalization is by itself, the method in her madness is even more insulting. Details are sparse, which is not a rarity for Harris, but her plan promises “to ensure that as the national cannabis industry takes shape, black men — who have, for years, been overpoliced for marijuana use — are able to access wealth and jobs in this new market.”
This promise to ensure “access” for black men to the marijuana industry could mean a lot of things, but in Harris’s home state of California, it meant the creation of a “cannabis equity” division in the state’s Department of Cannabis Control. Through the cannabis equity program, black people can become “equity entrepreneurs,” which makes them eligible for state and local grants to help them become marijuana retailers.
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But state taxes and regulations make the legal market uncompetitive with the illegal market. The legalization of recreational marijuana has made it impossible for police to crack down on unlicensed sellers who skirt regulations and don’t pay sales taxes as licensed sellers do. The result is a booming illegal marijuana market and a lot of bankrupt legal marijuana dealers.
It is insulting to black voters that the first thing Harris could think of when trying to reach out to them was to help them sell harmful drugs for a living. It can be no surprise that many black citizens are considering voting for Trump. He has been mendaciously smeared and misrepresented for referring to “black jobs.” Now, Kamala Harris has revealed what she thinks of when pondering jobs suitable for black men.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
