Tuesday was a good night for conservatives in most parts of America. Republican Matt Bevin’s victory to become Kentucky’s governor was as resounding as it was unexpected. Even more surprising was the down-ballot defeat of Democrats’ presumptive 2016 Senate nominee for state auditor, as well as the near-defeat of the Democrats’ entire statewide slate of candidates.
Elsewhere, sensible policies generally carried the day. A well-funded gun control campaign in Virginia failed to flip even a single state Senate seat. San Francisco voters rejected an ordinance restricting AirBnB rentals and ousted a sheriff who took pride in protecting illegal immigrant criminals from deportation. Portland, Maine, rejected a $15 minimum wage. Houston voters, who backed President Obama twice, overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have allowed transgender people who were still anatomically men the right to use women’s restrooms.
Perhaps most significantly, Ohioans crushed, three-to-one, a measure to legalize marijuana, bucking what has become a national trend elsewhere.
We have long opposed pot legalization, and we have frequently set forth in this space the reasons for our opposition. Among them is the fact that marijuana is fraudulently billed as a safe drug, when in reality it can permanently damage brain development for adults who use it well into their late twenties.
But this particular measure on the ballot in Ohio was even more pernicious than the average legalization scheme, such as those that have passed in states further west.
The losing “yes” side outspent the winning “no” side by more than 30-to-1 for the simple reason that the Ohio measure was an egregious piece of crony capitalism. It would have created what one might felicitously call Big Dope. It would have changed the state constitution to given 10 firms the right to a marijuana oligopoly. Naturally, it was in the interest of the 10 firms’ owners, who stood to become fabulously wealthy, to put a lot of money into this ballot initiative. And they sure did. Each of the 10 pitched in $4 million to persuade voters to let them establish their state-sponsored drug cartel. According to news reports, they expected to grow and sell more than $1 billion worth of marijuana each year.
This was more than even many devoted pro-marijuana campaigners could stomach, and it led to Tuesday night’s lopsided result.
The push for legalization of recreational drugs, which comes at the expense of public order and children’s well-being, seems to have spawned a new generation of rent-seekers whose concern for the public interest, prison reform, and medical science is cynical and self-serving.
With America suffering a new heroin epidemic, we hope that both Congress and state governments will be cautious about moving down the path that western states have taken toward blunting their populations’ human potential. And we hope that voters will again reject marijuana legalization, even when it isn’t packaged in such an unpalatable proposal.
