Paul Halvorsen’s “My Turn” (Monitor Opinion, March 2) is yet another frantic attempt to stoke fear in the public’s mind about legalizing marijuana. But, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once stated, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
He begins with a salvo of statistics to demonstrate that driving in Colorado has become a nightmare since the drug was made legal. But in one Google search, his first 10 bulleted facts can be explained and then completely discounted. Quoting from a Pulitzer Prize-winning publication: “The number of highway deaths involving Colorado drivers who had marijuana in their system grew again in 2017, a new state study shows. At the same time, traffic fatalities in which drivers had enough marijuana in their bloodstream to be deemed legally impaired dropped sharply, from 52 in 2016 to 35 last year. The reason for this seeming contradiction: Marijuana can remain in the bloodstream for weeks, so a positive blood test may not mean a driver was stoned at the time of a deadly crash.”
The rest of his article is similarly deceptive nonsense like tainted mother’s milk and contraction of heinous, previously unheard of diseases. It’s like the drug just showed up causing havoc and hasn’t been smoked for the last half century by a significant portion of the population.
So legislators, please ignore the hysteria and get on with legalizing and taxing this substance like all the other states around us have done. We need that revenue.
GLENN HORNER
Epsom