Just say no to Big Dope — and to even more legal marijuana

Will more marijuana use make America a better place?

Not many who’ve seen and smelled what legalizing the drug has done to cities like New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco would say so.

Yet President Donald Trump is contemplating a change to marijuana’s federal classification that would make it easier to buy and more profitable to sell.

The pot industry — Big Dope — is heavily invested in getting its product recategorized from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 drug.

Industry leaders ponied up for a $1-million-a-plate Trump fundraising dinner earlier this month to hear what the president had in mind, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The president should ignore the well-funded cannabis lobby: What matters is what more and cheaper marijuana will mean for ordinary Americans.

Twenty-four states have legalized recreational use of the drug, despite the ugly results experienced by the first state to do so.

Taking advantage of high Democratic turnout the year of President Barack Obama’s re-election, activists passed a Colorado ballot measure to make pot legal back in 2012.

Legalization didn’t take effect until 2014, but by 2022 marijuana use in Colorado and other states that had then legalized was 24% higher than in states where recreational use remained illegal.

A study by the South Korean scholar Sunyoung Lee published in the International Review of Law and Economics this year examines what’s happened to crime levels in US states that legalized pot.

Lee reported his findings “do not yield conclusive evidence supporting a reduction in crime rates after legalizing recreational marijuana. Rather, they underscore notable positive associations with property crimes and suggest potential correlations with violent crimes.”

The marijuana lobby claims that drug prohibition, not the drug itself, drives violent crime.

That would be a bad argument even without evidence like Lee’s, which suggests legal weed makes crime worse.

After all, any profit-driven criminal enterprise could be shut down by simply legalizing the crime in question.

If bank robbery were legal, bank robbers wouldn’t need to use guns.

If auto theft were legal, carjackers wouldn’t have to use force, and there wouldn’t be any violence associated with black-market chop shops because the chop shops would all be as legal as the commercial marijuana industry is today.

Legalize everything Tony Soprano does, and Tony won’t have to get rough — but he’ll only do more of what he was doing before.

Libertarians who argue for legalizing drugs to stop drug violence are closer than they realize to the radical leftists who argue property crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted. 

The psychology is the same: They sympathize with the people who make it harder to live in a civilized society and reject society’s right to defend its rules.

There are downsides to laws against marijuana, just as there are costs to protecting private property and citizens’ bodily safety.

But the costs are well worth paying when the alternative is passivity in the face of aggression, handing your belongings or your life over to any thug who makes a demand.

For a time marijuana legalization was sold to voters as just a matter of leaving people alone to consume whatever they want in private, without bothering anybody else.

Yet millions of Americans have now lived long enough with pot legalization, or the non-enforcement of laws still on the books, to know the pot lobby perpetrated a fraud.

What the country has actually had to deal with is pot smoking so rife in public that the offensive smell — and the sight and sounds of intoxication — smacks you in your face.

It’s hardly different from dope-users blowing smoke right in your eyes on the street.

That’s not the worst crime in the world — but neither is shoplifting, and there’s no reason to tolerate that, either.

Tolerating such things only breeds more tolerance for worse abuses, which is what has led progressives to treat even violent criminals with the utmost leniency.

Two scenes in the suburbs of DC convinced me pot tolerance has gone too far.

First was seeing an African-American bus driver, on a blazing hot summer day, order two dope-smoking teens to put out their joints and be aware there were children around.

To the extent our cities work at all it’s because of working-class men like him — and the rest of us have to decide whether we’re on his side or the punks’.

A year or so later I watched a young mother one bright October afternoon hold her small daughter’s hand as they walked through a neighborhood reeking of high-potency pot.

The multibillion-dollar weed industry got to advertise its product to a little girl about 4 years old that day.

It’s an industry that notoriously even sells its drug in candy form, as “gummies.”

Our cities and towns shouldn’t be open-air drug dens — and Trump shouldn’t let a lobby get high off of making Americans’ lives worse.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.