You’re not an American if you don’t subscribe to a conspiracy theory.
More than half of us believe the government is concealing or withholding key information about the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and there are 12 million of our fellow citizens who say, yes, the world is ruled, not so secretly, by reptilians “in people suits.” (Nice suits.)
The conservatives who run our country and the alt-righters who voted for them have uncovered their own vast plots. President Donald Trump has tweeted out vague support for the notion that vaccines cause autism—a topic on which he shares common ground with Jill Stein—and if you haven’t been subjected to tweets linking anti-fascist, anarchist protesters to their sugar daddy George Soros, well, then you haven’t tweeted!
Now comes New Jersey Governor Chris Christie with his big reveal: Marijuana legalization is a plot, cooked up by Democrats, designed to poison the bodies and minds of young people.
Christie has made his diametric opposition to marijuana legalization painfully clear. As a presidential candidate, he vowed to shut down Colorado’s billion-dollar retail cannabis market. While governor, he’s done all but build a jersey barrier and shut down a bridge to slow down or stop New Jersey’s embrace of medical marijuana.
But on Monday, Christie upped the ante Atlantic City-style, telling a dinnertime gathering of hospital executives that marijuana legalization is the work of “crazy liberals” who want to “poison our kids,” as POLITICO reported.
State lawmakers in New Jersey want to be the first legislators in the country to legalize cannabis themselves, rather than foist the decision onto voters, and the effort, led by State Sen. Nick Scutari and Senate President Stephen Sweeney is gaining momentum.
Over the weekend, the state’s largest newspaper group published an editorial calling for legal cannabis sales—sufficiently agitating Christie enough for the governor to channel his inner chemtrail.
“People like Nick Scutari and Steve Sweeney and Phil Murphy want to bring this poison, legalized, into this state under the premise that, well, it doesn’t matter because people can buy it illegally anyway,” Christie said, as per POLITICO. “Then why not legalize heroin? I mean, their argument fails just on that basis. Let’s legalize cocaine. Let’s legalize heroin. Let’s legalize angel dust. Let’s legalize all of it. What’s the difference? Let everybody choose.”
In a valiant attempt to win a round of Reefer Madness bingo, Christie also suggested that marijuana use leads to heroin addiction (it doesn’t) and also downplayed the importance of the potential sales tax revenue created by a legal retail marijuana market.
“I can say this now because I’m not running for anything again: $300 million is nothing,” Christie said. “We have a $35.5 billion budget; $300 million is a rounding error. I’m sorry. It’s true. Think about it, that’s one percent, less than one percent, of the entire state budget for a year. And we’re going to poison our kids for one percent more money that they can spend on some God awful, stupid program that they can put in the mailer and send out and say, ‘I delivered $300 million more for this.’”
For once, at least part of a conservative creation myth fits this script: It is true that George Soros’s money has funded most of the major marijuana legalization efforts to date, beginning with California’s medical-marijuana initiative, Prop. 215, back in 1996. But since Republicans rely on angel financiers like the Koch brothers and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson—to whom Sean Spicer felt indebted enough to apologize personally, on behalf of all American Jews, for his Hitler-Holocaust flub a few weeks back—so for Christie to raise the new world order specter, Alex Jones-style, just wouldn’t do.
At the same time, here we have the head of Trump’s commission tasked with ending the opiate crisis, spouting gateway theory and dismissing the notion that cannabis has any role in the effort, despite clear evidence that medical marijuana reduces Americans’ reliance on prescription drugs.
This does not bode well.
It is almost as if the forces of government are allayed against marijuana, which pharmaceutical companies fear could reduce Americans’ reliance on prescription drugs. But that would be crazy.
