Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department’s Robert McMahon is charged with enforcing the law on marijuana use. But he is very concerned about the many hidden ramifications of decriminalizing cannabis, making it legal for anyone to grow and smoke hemp. He’s afraid of what the second largest city and most populous state in the country would look like in 20 years if weed is made legal.
"I think that anytime that an intoxicant is made legal there are social costs associated with it. And I point directly to cigarettes and alcohol as examples,” he says. "We’re talking about loss of work and collisions, work-related industrial injuries. Somebody comes to work stoned, and they are working some heavy equipment or up on a high-rise — a window washer that’s stoned — not only could he [or she] injure himself, but some of his or her negligence could cause someone else to be injured." [rollingout.com]
No, it won’t. This will never happen, not even once. Under California’s current marijuana policy, the number of stoned window washers falling from buildings and f$%king people up on the streets below is exactly zero. Mathematically, even a one-hundred-fold increase in marijuana use would still produce no incidents of buckets, hippies, scaffolding and other random crap collapsing and crashing down on people from above (0 multiplied by 100 is still 0, you may recall).
Yet, as dumb as this all sounds – and it sounds pretty damned stupid, doesn’t it? – I am not at all surprised to find opponents of marijuana reform attempting to exploit the natural human fear of having stuff fall from the sky and land on your head. I would, and I’m being completely serious here, be far more surprised if no one in the fanatical anti-cannabis crowd ever bothered to argue at any point in this debate that the legalization of marijuana could easily result in window washers falling from the sides of skyscrapers and maiming pedestrians on the sidewalks of American cities.
If one were to calculate the totality of idiotic nonsense put forth routinely by these people, you would be certain to conclude that the likelihood of this particular stupid idea being introduced by them is extraordinarily high, higher by far in both literal and figurative terms than any window washer on the planet.
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