Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Friday that he believes the legalization of marijuana will lead to a widespread decline in children’s IQs in a decade, The Aspen Times newspaper reported Friday.
During an appearance at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, Bloomberg was asked for his opinion on the state’s move to legalize marijuana.
“What are we going to say in 10 years when we see all these kids whose IQs are 5 and 10 points lower than they would have been?” the billionaire businessman and former three-term mayor said, according to the newspaper.
Bloomberg described the nationwide push toward legalization as “one of the stupider things that’s happening across our country.”
He said he had smoked marijuana in the 1960s but asserted marijuana today is more damaging, the newspaper reported.
Mike’s opinion and $5 will get ya a cup of coffee…
Is bourbon more dangerous than wine because it’s ten times stronger?
IMO, no. Mike’s being stupid here.
It both perplexes and amazes me how the vast sums of money spent over half a century on studies trying to establish that marijuana is either meaningfully harmful or has beneficial medicinal effects have failed to produce any clearcut, unequivocal, reproducible results and how passionately those on both sides of the issue are about advocating for legalization or continued criminalization on the basis of those studies.
The only clearcut evidence of harm I’ve seen is the finding that about 9% of users will develop a degree of dependence that is functionally equivalent to addiction. The only clearcut evidence of benefit I’ve seen is the chemo nausea studies.
Which brings me back to the alcohol and tobacco comparative standard. If you can’t show it’s more harmful than one or both of those, there’s no reason it should be illegal.
Big Cotton money on the table. Big wood-pulp money on the table. You get the idea…it’s capitalists trying to stop competition - exactly as Marx predicts they will.
Didn’t realize he was a scientist who has any actual expertise in this subject. It’s this type of make-believe nonsense that harms good policy. Legal marijuana still isn’t legal for kids. Will there be a slight uptick in pot smoking teens if it is just a bit easier to get when it is legal? Perhaps, but it won’t become an epidemic as there is no evidence that I’ve ever read that legal weed will lead to a nation of weed smokers.
And when it is legal, people will smoke it without the fallacy that it is a highly dangerous narcotic, which may lead them to actually listen when the gov’t tells them that meth and heroin are actually, in fact, highly dangerous narcotics.
Lastly, alcohol. It’s worse, legal and widely available.