Editorial Roundup: Mississippi

Neshoba Democrat. February 17, 2022.

Editorial: True medical marijuana?

A strong medical marijuana bill is what many local and state leaders were demanding so we can only hope that’s what SB 2095 is now that it’s law.

The marijuana issue has consumed an enormous amount of bandwidth in large part due to recreational users and the big money pot lobby leading the charge.

To be sure, there are individuals in our state who will be significantly better off with access to medically prescribed doses of cannabis.

The pot lobby, however, was demanding a recreational marijuana card that would have led to more people smoking weed along with all of the societal ills casual use brings including being a gateway to heroin and other drugs that cause overdoses and even death.

Mitigating the chances for abuse is noble, but that is impossible and we shall see where this goes.

Approval of Initiative 65 drops to about 40% when taking into account the number of registered voters statewide. So, there never has been a mandate.

The get-out-to-vote marijuana campaign was highly targeted to users in a digital age and ought to be a general warning about the influence of big money in future initiatives because of the incredible power to target certain voters digitally on their devices.

Enshrining legalized marijuana in the state Constitution is not what most Mississippians thought they were voting for in November, but that’s what Initiative 65 would have done.

Again, there is a warning.

The bill the governor signed is not the one he or most of us would have written, but it’s where we are and it’s now the law.

Significant improvements in about the 50th draft were made giving more local control of growing and marijuana dispensaries, but will it be enough?

In signing the bill into law — and a law can be amended or changed unlike the constitutional amendment that would have enshrined pot as a right — Gov. Tate Reeves listed a small sampling of the improvements he and others fought to include in the final version of the bill. Those improvements included:

• Reduces the total amount that any one individual can receive to 3 oz. per month. This one change will reduce the total amount by 40% from the original version (I asked for 50%). Said differently, there will be hundreds of millions of fewer joints on the streets because of this improvement.

• The medical professional can only prescribe within the scope of his/her practice. And they have to have a relationship with the patient. And it requires an in-person visit by the patient to the medical professional.

• Only an MD or DO can prescribe for kids under 18 and only with the consent of a parent/legal guardian.

• An MD or DO must prescribe for young adults between the ages of 18-25.

• The MSDH will promulgate rules regarding packaging and advertising, and I have confidence they will do so in a way that limits the impact on our young people.

• Prohibits any incentives for the Industry from the Mississippi Development Authority.

• Protects our churches and schools from having a marijuana dispensary within fewer than 1,000 feet of their location.

Rep. Jill Ford, a Republican from Madison, had sponsored her own bill with a slower approach but it was never taken up in the House.

“My bill would have taken a slower approach than the Senate bill. It was a true medical marijuana program,” Ford said.

Sen. Jenifer Branning, a Republican from Philadelphia, has said her concern is one of public safety and health and she, like Ford in the House, did not vote for the bill.

A true medical marijuana law is where we want to be as a state and it’s good to know we still have elected officials who are supportive of the need but undestand the dangers and prefer a slower approach that addresses public safety and health.

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Greenwood Commonwealth. February 18, 2022.

Editorial: A Violent Crime Comparison

Everyone talks about how crime is up. It definitely has risen in some places — such as Jackson, the Mississippi capital city that is struggling with one of the nation’s highest per-capita homicide rates.

Information from 2021 is not yet available, but a chart on TheWhyAxis website makes a compelling case that violent crime rates in 1980 and 1994 were a lot worse than today’s.

The chart is based on information from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. It tracks the ages of people arrested for violent crimes — murder, “non-negligent” manslaughter, robbery and aggravated assault — in 1980, 1994 and 2019. It eliminates population differences by measuring the arrests per 100,000 people.

There are some obvious trends:

– There were far fewer people from age 12 to 63 arrested for violent crimes in 2019 than in the two earlier years. It’s not even close. Even if there’s been an increase in violent crime since 2019, it’s unlikely the country is approaching the number of arrests in 1980 — and today’s rates are nowhere close to those of 1994.

– 1994 was a busy time for law enforcement. The number of violent crime arrests that year is shocking. It helps explain why Congress and states passed all sorts of legislation during that decade, such as truth-in-sentencing laws, to lock up more offenders and keep them locked up for longer stretches of time. The country had a serious problem with violent crime, but the reaction that followed produced its own headaches because the harsher sentencing laws in some places, including Mississippi, targeted all crimes, not just violent ones. That drove up incarceration costs to an unsustainable level, depopulated low-income neighborhoods of adult males and put a greater emphasis on punishment than rehabilitation. Mississippi and much of the rest of the country have spent recent years trying to reverse that earlier overreaction.

– 2019 also is different from the other two years in terms of the age of those arrested for violent crimes. The story quotes an official with The Sentencing Project, who noted that in 1980 and 1994, violent crime arrests were highest among 18-year-olds. But in 2019, the peak is between ages 25 and 27. This is partly because in 2019 there were a lot fewer 18-year-olds arrested for a violent crime. Nevertheless, given that much of the violent crime in America has tended to be “a young man’s game,” as TheWhyAxis put it, a rising age peak is troubling.

– One more item of note is an increase in violent crime in 2019 among people in their 50s and 60s. These are a far smaller number of cases than those in which teenagers and 20-somethings are arrested. But the arrest rate for those 50 and older was lowest in 1980, second lowest in 1994 and highest in 2019.

Violent-crime arrest rates in 2019 for those aged 30 to 45 also were higher than in 1980. Sociologists and criminologists could have a field day explaining this kind of information.

This certainly is not the definitive word on crime rates in 2022. For one thing, what about cases where no one got arrested? And the chart excludes non-violent crimes such as burglary.

There’s little doubt that, whatever the statistics say, people are worried about crime. It does make a good case against defunding the police. Freedom means nothing without safety.

END