I wanted to quickly address the absurdity of Laura Ingraham’s insinuation that heavy marijuana use is to blame for the recent young male mass shooters in this country. I am not getting political or jumping on a conspiracy bandwagon but I have to believe that if we are centering the conversation on marijuana use in young people and then extrapolating that out to be an intention of “Big Weed” as she calls it, it feels (to me at least) that this is a distraction made by her to move the conversation in a different and weird direction.
Here is the clip from a few anchors discussing this very point. I want to be clear that this is not an attack on the right, nor is it defense for the left. It is purely a look at the absurdity of what our media is pushing as a narrative for and against each side. A complete departure from the real issue at hand:
There are studies like this one that support the hypothesis and it’s also known that individuals who engage with psychedelics at a young age can trigger early onset schizophrenia and other neurological disorders within individuals that have pre-existing conditions for the disease.
It’s not all bullshit.
What’s irresponsible to me is to use a separate agenda to thrust this onto the mainstream as the next place to attack. This is a highly sensitive subject on both sides of the aisle and varying opinions for changes we need to make to ensure our children are healthy, happy, and safe in our society. To place marijuana use at the center of the conversation, by definition, negates a host of other contributing factors that we’d be far better to put our energy towards.
What was triggering to me was not the insinuation that we should take an honest look at young people’s use and treat it seriously (I agree we should) but to levy the entire argument on some sort of agenda by the Marijuana companies to push marijuana use onto young people is wrong. The same way I feel banning all guns because of a few bad actors, is also wrong.
I’m in no way advocating for marijuana use by anyone that is not of legal age, in a legal state, and isn’t fully aware of the consequences to ingesting any drug into their bodies. We should all get behind protecting our youth, and our adults from understanding the dangers that can come with any habitual and repetitive drug and alcohol use. I’m personally a result of a young person who abused drugs and alcohol for a really long time. I just don’t believe we can blame mass shootings on this alone and we need to focus on education, appropriate use, and a focus on building our young people’s internal belief structures to better combat against turning to drugs as coping mechanisms.
We have a systemic mental health epidemic in this country forming out of a host of causes in early childhood and the society we’re all living in. We need to focus the conversation more broadly on what we can do to help young people not just survive but thrive in early adulthood and we can’t do that if we are taking jabs at opponents on either side of the aisle and using horrifically tragic incidents as the pawn.
This feels like a topic we should all be able to discuss openly and be aligned on the primary goal. Instead, we are still flinging shit over the fence to discredit and hurt the other side. That is a primary reason I’m losing faith in our two party systems ability to work together and find the middle path.
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