It’s been quite a week for anti-pot arguments: first it was that smoking marijuana will give you a heart attack; then that all the wildlife—particularly bunnies—will get stoned; and now that legal pot ups the murder rate.
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton blames his city’s small increase in shootings this year on marijuana decriminalization, saying, “In this city, people are killing each other over marijuana more so than anything that we had to deal with an 80s and 90s with heroin and cocaine.”
“We just see marijuana everywhere when we make these arrests, when we get these guns off the streets,” he said.
Although the rise in shootings has been described as a “17 percent” increase, that’s only an increase from 45 homicides by February of last year to 54 this year. As the Washington Post’s Radley Balko notes, that still puts New York’s murder rate vastly below what it was in the 90s:
The pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance released a statement condemning Bratton’s remarks, calling them “ridiculous” and suggesting that the best way to end violence in an illegal market is to fully legalize marijuana.
“It appears that finding marijuana on the scene of a violent crime is enough for Bratton to assert a causal link,” they write. “Using that rationale, we can make other causal links to violence – for instance, if police find a cell phone at the scene of a violent crime, then certainly the cell phone must cause that crime. “
Watch Bratton’s comments via Mediaite.
