(oooh, I'm gonna get flamed for this...)
All is definitely not awesome in the Land of Legal Pot. I have been watching this - since the idea was floated some years back, of "Decriminalizing," or of State Nullification (where we're at, now) I've warned that this was an evil genii that wasn't going back into the bottle.
State Nullification I support. But not legalization of this. I knew potheads in high school (mid-1970s) when the ditch-weed of the time was a whole lot weaker, and I saw what it did. Saw what classes, what tracks, they were in. Heard their illogical discussions - of what impaired potheads like to discuss, sports, nastybad cops, and which girls were putting out. But I could easily sense the mental inflexibility.
Eight years later as a welfare caseworker, I saw the same. Usually as the pothead either got caught frauding (to me it just meant a reason to close a case; seldom were any of these prosecuted) or otherwise messed up his life. Like not coming in for six-month "redetermination" and then having the Foo Stamms stopped, the check not come, and the slumlord throwing the pothead out in days, due to various loopholes he'd exploit.
THEN...Colorado. I lived there in the mid-1990s. Denver was a big small town, in the best sense. Colorado Springs was beautiful - and safe. But the California hordes were arriving - along with the Crips and Bloods, to sell drugs to them and their kids.
Crime was still local - to be a victim of crime was to be close to criminal activity, like drug-purchasing, or sex-work-purchasing. Not a big concern for most of us - just disconcerting.
I left, and that was when the Ghey Mafia took over, and legalized the Demon Weed. And no, it didn't solve Colorado's revenue problems. Nor their crime problems. Nor their social problems.
What it did do, is what we still see, there. It normalized Public Stupidity - in driving; in personal choices (such as in pairing-off with dangerous persons, either sex, who wind up unaliving the pot-impaired unwise-chooser). It made driving dangerous.
Colorado, once a Red bastion of Second-Amendment support...now has "gun control" laws that compare with Gnu Yark's. And they need it - with the army of homeless non-American invaders, with the chaos, the crime, the exploding cost of housing that came from money-printing channeled through banks and Wall Street...Denver is starting to look a bit like Mexico City.
Okay. I never lived there since they legalized pot. But I was right here in Montana, and I sure-as-hell do see the change. The idiot-driving; and often with the driver's window cracked, as he sucks on a vape pen and blows his choom out the window. You learn to see it, and especially since cigarette smoking has nearly disappeared. Tobacco use in cars is scarcely evident. You see someone going through the motions of smoking, and you'll see a black or pink vape pen in his/her fingers. AND you'll see him puzzle on how to deal with a four-way stop sign.
Ohio, where I grew up, likewise legalized the Demon Weed. And I see THAT aspect of dementia on police body-cam vids taken in areas I know well - the neighborhoods, the streets, of Cleveland's West Side. We used to say, the West Side is the Best Side, but now it's as chaotic and dangerous as Hough (if any reader knows Cleveland).
One example, suggests correlation. Repeated examples of cause-effect-result, strongly suggest causation.
