The evidence for keeping weed illegal keeps mounting — even as the laws get looser.
A new, peer-reviewed study (on a significant data set of nearly 60,000 Canadians) has shown that adults who misuse pot have a 60% higher risk of experiencing their first heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event.
In other words: Weed’s not a harmless vice.
It’s a killer, like cigarettes.
And unlike cigarettes, it literally drives people insane.
A massive Danish study based on nearly 7 million health records drew a strong correlation between heavy cannabis use and increased risk of schizophrenia in young men.
That’s to say nothing of the fact that pot, no matter what its advocates claim, likely serves as a gateway drug: Evidence suggests a link between cannabis use in kids and later opioid use, and the drug can play a role in rewiring the reward circuitry in young brains.
Or the soaring levels of THC — the psychoactive chemical in weed — seen since the ’90s.
As use becomes more widespread, in other words, the drug is getting more and more powerful.
Given the all-consuming safetyism that defines modern progressive politics, the crusade to legalize weed (and normalize it!) is bizarre in light of the increasing evidence it’s a terrible idea on health grounds.
With macabre, albeit unintentional humor, New York City’s own topsy-turvy Health Department warns “Avoid smoking cannabis rolled or mixed with tobacco” because “there is no safe amount of tobacco use.”
And in big cities like New York, letting people get high on the streets supercharges the social decay caused by rollbacks of policing and sentencing for more serious crimes.
As does the proliferation of plainly illegal weed shops here.
Nearly a third of adults under 35 regularly smoke weed; nearly 70% of Americans back legalization, despite all this.
They need to wake up and smell the blunt smoke before the next big drug crisis arrives.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
