By Matt Agorist
“Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” – Jeff Sessions, Attorney General
“I reject the idea that America will be a better place if marijuana is sold in every corner store. And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana—so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful,” President Donald Trump’s darling Attorney General, Jeff Sessions said earlier this year. “Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life.”
While any sane person with half a brain can easily see how ignorant and outright irresponsible Sessions’ comments are, a new study on marijuana shops shows just how asinine this man’s policy actually is.
Contrary to the fear mongering from the champion of the prison industrial complex, legal weed actually reduces crime.
In the study, titled, “Going to pot? The impact of dispensary closures on crime,” researchers Tom Y. Chang from the USC Marshall School of Business, and Mireille Jacobson from The Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, looked at what happens with the government forced medical marijuana dispensaries to close. What they found was immediately following a closure of a dispensary — crime rates went up.
“Contrary to popular wisdom, we found an immediate increase in crime around dispensaries ordered to close relative to those allowed to remain open,” Jacobson told Science Daily.
The researchers noted that dispensaries actually increase the ‘walkability score’ of a neighborhood which deters criminal activity.
“The connection between restaurants and MMDs is that they both contribute to the ‘walkability score’ of a given area. Areas with higher scores have more ‘eyes upon the street’ a factor that is proven to deter some types of crime,” said Jacobson.
Directly challenging Sessions ignorance on the matter, the researchers explicitly noted the opposite of what he says is true.
“Our results demonstrate that the dispensaries were not the crime magnets that they were often described as, but instead reduced crime in their immediate vicinity,” said Jacobson.
What this study illustrates is that Sessions’ policies of bringing back D.A.R.E., continuing to clamp down on pot, and removing state’s rights, would not only be detrimental to fighting the opioid epidemic, but it would also create more crime.
This study, while it may not be groundbreaking to those who pay attention to the effects of the war on drugs, is certainly a landmark on the path to legal weed.
As the Free Thought Project has reported numerous times, government outlawing substances is a catalyst for criminal behavior.
When the government makes certain substances illegal, it does not remove the demand. Instead, the state creates crime by pushing the sale and control of these substances into the illegal black markets. All the while, demand remains constant.
We can look at the prohibition of alcohol and the subsequent mafia crime wave that ensued as a result as an example. The year 1930, at the peak of prohibition, happened to be the deadliest year for police in American history. 300 police officers were killed, and innumerable poor people slaughtered as the state cracked down on drinkers.
Outlawing substances does not work.
Criminal gangs form to protect sales territory and supply lines. They then monopolize the control of the constant demand. Their entire operation is dependent upon police arresting people for drugs because this grants them a monopoly on their sale.
However, the illegality of drug possession and use is what keeps the low-level users and dealers in and out of the court systems driving an entire industry that deals in ruining human lives.
This revolving door of creating and processing criminals fosters the phenomenon known as Recidivism. Recidivism is a fundamental concept of criminal justice that shows the tendency of those who are processed into the system and the likelihood of future criminal behavior.
The War on Drugs takes good people and turns them into criminals every single minute of every single day. The system is set up in such a way that it fans the flames of violent crime by essentially building a factory that turns out violent criminals.
The system knows this too!
When drugs are legalized, gang violence drops — drastically. Not only does it have a huge effect on the localized gangs in America, but the legalization of drugs is crippling to the violent foreign drug cartels, too.
Until Americans educate themselves on the cause of this violence, uninformed and corrupt lawmakers will continue to focus on controlling the symptoms.
When looking at Sessions’ policies, and the mountain of evidence showing how detrimental to freedom and progress they are, we come to two possible reasons he continues to push them.
The first reason, and least likely one, is that Sessions is a blithering idiot who actually buys into the reefer madness nonsense.
However, the second and more likely reason is that Sessions knows his policies create crime and bolster the prison industrial complex and he and his good ole boy network of tyrants in D.C. stand to make a killing by perpetuating the drug war.
Either way, this tyrant and tyrants like him are bad for your liberties.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.
