SENATE PRESIDENT STAN ROSENBERG, who has not joined the group of powerhouse politicos that has come together to oppose legalization of recreational marijuana, says he has yet to be convinced by arguments that legalizing marijuana would exacerbate the state’s opioid addiction crisis.
Asked Tuesday during a question and answer session with State House reporters about the argument that the state should not be legalizing marijuana amidst the deadly opioid crisis, Rosenberg said he remains unsure about any connection between marijuana use and the addiction epidemic.
“I’m not an expert so I have no opinion right now on that and I haven’t studied it,” Rosenberg said. “I’ve heard those comments. I’m not sure what they’re basing it on, and it would be helpful to see what information they’re using to come to that conclusion.”
Gov. Charlie Baker, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, and House Speaker Robert DeLeo announced last month that they will spearhead the anti-legalization campaign fighting a November ballot question that would legalize recreational use of marijuana in the state. Attorney General Maura Healey has dalso come out against legalization, though she is not taking a role in the campaign.
Rosenberg’s remarks seem to put him in the camp of those skeptical about claims that marijuana is a “gateway” drug leading to use of harder drugs, including opioids.
Baker, Walsh, and Healey made the gateway argument in a Boston Globe op-ed they coauthored in March. Research “shows that regular marijuana users — especially those who start at a young age — are more likely to try more dangerous drugs,” they wrote.
CommonWealth reported last week that an increasing body of research has rejected the idea of marijuana as a gateway drug.
Rosenberg has not staked out a position on the ballot question, but he has said he believes adults should be able to make their own decisions about personal use of marijuana.
Rosenberg said his preference would be for voters to weigh in on an advisory question asking whether they favor legalization. If such a vote were affirmative, he said, the Legislature should then work to craft a law that takes into consideration a wider range of issues than are covered by the ballot question, which solely represents views of legalization proponents.
He conceded, however, that such an approach seems unlikely to be pursued.
“It worries me to see a ballot question of this nature,” said Rosenberg. “I know that the proponents worked hard to do a good job at developing a bill, but it comes from only one perspective.”
He said there are “lots of the things the bill is silent on, and one of the challenges we have is that when a ballot question passes, the Legislature then has a problem going in and changing it because the proponents argue it’s the people’s law, you have to leave it alone.”
Among the issues Rosenberg has concerns about are the commercialization and advertising of marijuana, the selling of marijuana in the form of “edibles,” and the potency of marijuana products.
Here are some simple facts:
Our policy regarding drugs is in the hands of frauds, liars and two bit crooks. Until they are removed from office or/and in handcuffs, poverty will increase, injustice will prevail and perversity will continue to rule.
A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, hallucinogens, alcohol or caffeine.
Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced and widely used by those who desire to do so.
Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
The massive majority of people who use drugs do so recreationally – getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
A very small minority of people will always experience drug use as problematic.
Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement – even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
The involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Cocaine from Central America has been well documented by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the late journalist Gary Webb.
It’s not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste hundreds of billions of our money in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the prohibited drugs have ever done.
The most useful function of prohibition is to act as a kind of barometer of ignorance, failure, hate and prejudice.