Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Yay.
That’s about as much enthusiasm as I can drum up for New Mexico’s legalization of marijuana for recreational use by adults.
If the Legislature had rejected the proposal so important to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham that she called it back for three long and costly days to bring it about, my reaction would have been, “Oh, darn.”
I approve of marijuana’s legalization, but with lots of reservations.
Marijuana and other consciousness-altering cannabis products can be enjoyed safely in homes or in specially designated areas without causing addiction and loss of productivity. The buzz is temporary, and one awakens the next day ready to be productive and responsible again.
Cannabis’ popularity can bring new tax revenues to the state by creating a new industry and if, done right, it can safely create new wealth for a state that needs some major economic boosts.
If the price of legal marijuana can undercut the black market, maybe our society can start to undermine the vicious criminal drug cartels that control too much of life in our poorest neighborhoods and drive immigrants from Central America to our less-than-welcoming borders.
My enthusiasm is dampened by some serious problems that come with marijuana.
Chief among them to me is people who think they can drive while they’re under the influence of marijuana.
They can’t, any more than people who think they can text and drive can do both with full attention. The human brain doesn’t do that kind of multi-tasking.
I don’t know where I learned this (“Certainly not from personal experience,” I lied.), but I happen to know that marijuana alters your vision and your sense of time. It also plays havoc with short-term memory. Not that you care while high.
That’s why it’s dangerous to drive stoned. But people will get behind the wheel while high and police are going to have big problems enforcing “drugged driving” laws and keeping the rest of us safe.
And what about kids from pre-adolescence to high school seniors? That’s the other serious problem.
Like alcohol, marijuana can cause physical and emotional harm to growing minds. Keeping it away from kids is going to be hard, but we must as best we can.
Marijuana and cannabis products are easy to hide, and too many kids will find ways to get it.
When I taught mostly young adult inmates at the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility, I would wager many if not most of my students had been addicted to drugs since they were kids. Not a particular drug, but addicted to being high on anything, as long as it wasn’t reality.
Psychologists consider addiction to be a destructive form of learning, and young minds learn fast. From what I saw, addictive learning handicapped their ability to meet academic challenges.
Colorado and Arizona seem to be benefiting, mostly, from legal cannabis, but no one denies the problems.
I hope New Mexico can learn from their painful experience and add more to adult pleasures than to society’s pains with legal cannabis.
Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: