“Our society thrived when everyone was smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey,” wrote Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh, completely ignoring the countless, well-documented, negative impacts (violence and death) of those two American vices. “We became the most powerful nation in the world with liquor and nicotine. No country of potheads has ever thrived, or ever achieved anything at all. Every city that legalized it became an even bigger shithole basically overnight. The entire history of western civilization tells us that marijuana is far, far worse for society.”

Dumbest fucking take I’ve read regarding weed in the U.S. in probably the past two decades. This is another one of those things that’s like so low on the list of outrageous things that require attention right now, but it’s just so fucking unbelievably dumb that it somehow becomes salient enough to be noticable above the chaos that is the normal background.

The way he is so confidently trying to gaslight society like an overbearing parent, as if we have no frame of reference regarding marijuana policy other than what we learned in D.A.R.E.

Those shithole cities with their absurd abundance of tax revenue from marijuana sales.

Opioid sparing effects in Medicare enrollees with access to medical marijuana.

Fewer lives ruined due to a reduction of nonviolent incarceration rates.

I’m not sure what kind of utopia Matt Walsh believes he is advocating for by rolling back even more evidence based progress, but it sounds like a shithole.