{"id":55415,"date":"2022-06-23T10:50:01","date_gmt":"2022-06-23T18:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2022\/06\/23\/cannabis-blamed-for-americas-mass-shooting-epidemic\/"},"modified":"2022-06-23T20:45:18","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T04:45:18","slug":"cannabis-blamed-for-americas-mass-shooting-epidemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2022\/06\/23\/cannabis-blamed-for-americas-mass-shooting-epidemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Cannabis Blamed for America\u2019s Mass-Shooting Epidemic"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Another week, another mass shooting to blame on cannabis. Six days after an 18-year-old who\u2019d just bought two AR-15-style rifles on his birthday murdered 19 fourth graders and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked her roughly 2.2 million viewers whether the real problem<\/em> wasn\u2019t actually cannabis legalization.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy aren\u2019t people in general not talking more about the pot-psychosis violent-behavior connection?\u201d asked Ingraham<\/a>, who added that anyone advocating gun-control measures\u2014such as the 90% of Americans who support<\/a> universal background checks\u2014as a rational response to Uvalde are \u201ccompletely oblivious to what the legalization of marijuana has done and is doing to an entire generation of Americans with violent consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first blush, injecting cannabis into the conversation over mass shootings seemed like a fresh spin, another effort at misdirection to steer the conversation toward \u201chardening\u201d schools, or arming teachers or vague jeremiads about \u201cmental health\u201d\u2014anything but a discussion about the easy availability of weapons or that particular weapon, the AR-15-style rifle, the instrument of choice in a mass-shooting in Buffalo the week before that claimed another ten innocent lives.<\/p>\n

But, in fact, Ingraham lifted her screed nearly verbatim from the Substack account of disgraced COVID conspiracy theorist<\/a> Alex Berenson, a former reporter at The New York Times<\/em> turned novelist turned multi-purpose conservative contrarian. Berenson noticed a post-publication change to a Times<\/em> item that initially reported an acquaintance\u2019s claim that the Uvalde shooter was mad that his grandmother \u201cdidn\u2019t let him smoke weed or do what he wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

That detail later disappeared from the story, which for Berenson was evidence of\u2026 well, not much, aside for more support for his pet theory. \u201cCannabis causes psychosis,\u201d as he wrote. \u201cPsychosis causes violence,\u201d he added, including, an unmistakable syllogistic link, mass shootings.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a serious charge, that\u2019s also completely unserious. Serious observers have already roundly dismissed<\/a> this fresh demonization of cannabis. Nonetheless, it\u2019s gaining new life as conservative commentators and politicians embrace cannabis as a method to stoke grievance in America\u2019s ongoing culture war.<\/p>\n

Rebirth of a Notion<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Before he became known as the COVID-19 pandemic\u2019s \u201cwrongest man\u201d<\/a> and got himself kicked off Twitter for claiming vaccines were worthless (or, actually, dangerous), Berenson\u2019s angle was being a cannabis legalization contrarian. In pursuit of this chimera, he peddled an anti-legalization polemic that, according to a mass letter signed by 100 researchers<\/a> in 2019, used \u201cflawed pop science and ideological polemics\u201d to \u201cpromote some of the worst myths about people of color and people with mental illness\u201d\u2014including the idea, unsupported by science, that cannabis makes them violent.<\/p>\n

In serious circles, such as the researchers and clinicians who signed onto the letter labeling Berenson\u2019s theories as worthless warmed-over garbage left over from the Just Say No era, the idea that cannabis legalization is connected to America\u2019s mass-shooting epidemic is laughed out of the room.<\/p>\n

But Ingraham\u2019s appropriation of Berenson\u2019s exploded theories set off a chain reaction in the right-wing media echo chamber, where, along with virulent transphobia, cannabis is being tested out<\/a> as a front in the culture war.<\/p>\n

On June 6, the conservative Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s even more conservative editorial page<\/a> said that, if it were true that the Uvalde shooter smoked weed\u2014an enormous, Hollywood-sign-sized \u201cif\u201d\u2014\u201cit would fit a pattern.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMass shooters at Rep. Gabby Giffords\u2019s constituent meeting in Tucson, AZ (2011); a movie theater in Aurora, CO (2012); the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (2016); the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX (2017); and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL (2018) were reported to be marijuana users,\u201d the WSJ opined. \u201cIt could be a coincidence, but increasing evidence suggests a connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

(It bears mentioning that most of those shooters were also AR-15-style rifle users, but that, surely, is a coincidence.)<\/p>\n

The Missing Link<\/strong><\/h4>\n

In addition to noting that the main link between mass shooters wasn\u2019t that they used weapons but that they smoked weed, Allysia Finley, the piece\u2019s author, cited a few studies in her argument. This included a meta-analysis, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry<\/em> in May 2020<\/a>, that tried to investigate an association between youth and \u201cthe risk of perpetuating physical violence.\u201d That meta-analysis, led by researchers in Canada\u2014where, just for funsies, cannabis was legalized nationwide in 2018\u2014found a \u201cmoderate association between cannabis use and physical violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment from Cannabis Now on how their work is currently being used to steer American attention away from gun control\u2014which is much stricter in Canada than in the US, and which has legalized cannabis, and which doesn\u2019t seem to be gripped by the same mass shooting epidemic.<\/p>\n

On June 13, the conservative Washington Examiner<\/em> hopped on the bullshit train<\/a>, adding its own fresh load of trash to the pile. \u201cOne way to reverse growing rates of violent crime,\u201d posed the newspaper\u2019s editorial board, using most of the same arguments as the Journal<\/em>, \u201cmay be to recriminalize the use of marijuana.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though violence absolutely surged<\/a> during the COVID-19 pandemic, on the aggregate, the US hasn\u2019t been this peaceful for decades. Violent crime, as Pew Research found<\/a>, dropped 49% between 1993\u2014right around when New York City launched a decade-long war on joints\u2014and 2019, by which time more than a dozen states had legalized adult-use cannabis. In fact, a 2018 study found<\/a> that the rates of certain crimes dropped in areas that had recently legalized cannabis.<\/p>\n

You could just as easily (and more convincingly) argue that legalization has made the US more peaceful. That at least might be a little more honest, if a little naive, as the causes of violence are known to be complex, an overlapping web of material circumstances.<\/p>\n

Political Quackery<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Rather than grapple with the broader set of facts or engage with skeptics, the conservative echo-chamber is sealing itself off. In a letter to The<\/em> Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s editorial board that the newspaper didn\u2019t print, Paul Armentano, the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, pointed out a slew of other studies, including a data analysis from the RAND Corporation that tried to find a link between cannabis dispensaries and crime\u2014and failed to do so.<\/p>\n

\u201cClaims that cannabis use causes violence are frankly absurd when you consider that there are tens of millions of regular cannabis consumers in the US who have never engaged in any violent activity and there have been no conclusive studies showing an association between violence and either cannabis use or its legalization,\u201d said Morgan Fox, NORML\u2019s political director, in a statement provided to Cannabis Now.<\/p>\n

\u201cCherry-picking anecdotal instances and pretending that they represent a \u2018disturbing trend\u2019 when the experiences of legal cannabis markets here and abroad say otherwise is just the newest iteration of a long-used tactic by unscrupulous prohibitionists to demonize this substance and the people that use it,\u201d he added. \u201cSuch assertions are pure political quackery, and an attempt to distract from the real issues at hand as well as the overwhelming successes that states have achieved by regulating cannabis.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, it doesn\u2019t seem like Berenson\u2019s shameless recycling of his increasingly dusty conspiracy theory is making much headway among the US public. But as mass shootings and dead children continue to pile up, and opponents of gun reform seek any other sacrificial lamb other than reasonable restrictions on who can own an AR-15, cannabis is taking another familiar turn in the barrel.<\/p>\n

The post Cannabis Blamed for America\u2019s Mass-Shooting Epidemic<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\nRead More: Cannabis Blamed for America\u2019s Mass-Shooting Epidemic<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another week, another mass shooting to blame on cannabis. Six days after an 18-year-old who\u2019d just bought two AR-15-style rifles on his birthday murdered 19 fourth graders and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked her roughly 2.2 million viewers whether theContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,16272,380,119,16273,65,16274,16275],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55415"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55416,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55415\/revisions\/55416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}