Fox News took a break from praising the president this week to offer the American public another style of fear-mongering — this time in the form of anti-cannabis Reefer Madness theories.
According to Media Matters, late last week, Tucker Carlson dedicated a segment on his nightly news show to the supposed connection between cannabis use and violence. With the help of guest Alex Berenson, the author of the controversial and largely disproven anti-legalization book Tell Your Children, the pair used debunked science and absurd logic to try and correlate cannabis use with America’s recent brash of deadly mass shootings.
“In the aftermath of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, the country scrambled, justifiably, to understand what motivated the killers,” Carlson said. “Ideology seemed like an obvious reason and we picked that apart at some length. But could it just be part of the answer? A toxicology report on the Dayton shooter, for example, revealed that he had several drugs in his system including cocaine and Xanax. He was also known to be a longtime user of marijuana. It turns out, in fact, that many violent individuals have been avid marijuana users. Is there a connection?”
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From there, Carlson and Berenson skip over the El Paso shooter’s white supremacist views, and right past the Dayton shooters postitive tests for cocaine and Xanax, and land squarely on cannabis use. For the crux of their argument, Carlson and Berenson rehashed claims about cannabis causing psychosis, and that in turn leading to violence.
“I don’t think it’s going way out on a limb to draw that connection then between cannabis use, particularly I assume chronic use, and acts of violence,” Carlson said.
In the latest research into the subject though, scientists in Spain examined the drug use and mental health of 1,588 teenagers, and found no relation between marijuana and psychosis. Of course, Carlson and Berenson did not mention that study. Or any others, for that matter.
You can watch the entire Carlson anti-cannabis segment above, but if you’re looking for real scientific information about cannabis and health, it’s probably best to avoid 24/7 news networks altogether.
Gallery — Fuck-Tons of Weed That Will Never Get Smoked … Except Maybe By Cops:
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