Jared Loughner: The Inevitable Marijuana Debate (With Obama’s Bong)
JARED Loughner was called a stoner by an older school colleague. Cue the inevitable marijuana debate. (Did Barack Obama smoke weed? You bring a spliff – I bring a bong…)
Adam Serwer gets it about right:
David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Klein are having a debate about whether or not marijuana use could have had an effect on the Tucson shooting by aggravating the shooter’s potential schizophrenia.
So he was nuts? It wasn’t grammar / Muslims / Sarah Palin / God / a drawing /a map/ marijuana / liberal ideals / Hitler / a grudge/ a question / Chicago and gun law made him do it. He might have been mentally ill?
The Center for Disease Control cites 79,000 alcohol-related deaths a year between 2001-2005. But we don’t ban alcohol because the one time we tried, it resulted in higher rates of violence, organized crime, and a plethora of other negative externalities. Alcohol use is also the most common addiction of people with schizophrenia. The evidence that marijuana causes schizophrenia isn’t very strong; the original article he links to notes that “[f]or as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population,” despite increased marijuana use in general.
Posted: 13th, January 2011 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
