If history remembers John Hickenlooper, it won’t be for his blink-and-you-missed-it run for president in 2019 – something Hickenlooper, no doubt, would rather forget.

If anything, it ought to be for opposing Colorado’s legalization of retail marijuana – and then supporting it. It’s a flip-flop the Democratic former governor also would just as soon forget.

Now, after a couple of forgettable years in the U.S. Senate, Hickenlooper has introduced legislation to pave the way for legal pot nationwide. Perhaps he thinks it will put him back on the country’s political radar. But it also suggests there’s yet another thing he is trying to forget – Colorado’s mounting woes since legalization in 2012.

Last Thursday, Hickenlooper announced the introduction of his Post-Prohibition Adult Use Regulated Environment Act – aka, PREPARE Act. The bill “directs the U.S. attorney general to develop a regulatory framework for when the federal government legalizes marijuana,” according to a statement released by his office.

The news release also touts Colorado’s “thriving, safe, marijuana industry” as a template for legalization nationally. It’s the result, Hick’s press office claims, of a regulatory framework he helped usher in when he was governor.

Legal recreational pot in fact has had an insidious, cumulative effect on Colorado over the years, steadily tearing away at our social fabric to say nothing of public safety and health. A growing body of data attests to that. Here’s a smattering:

• Five years into legalization, when Hickenlooper served as Colorado governor, the federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area ranked our state first in the nation for marijuana use by children ages 12-17.
• A landmark study of 26,000 impaired-driving cases in Colorado in 2019 showed 45% of drivers tested positive for more than one substance, according to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice. The most common combination was alcohol and pot.
• Just since 2019, there has been a 44% increase in fatalities in Colorado involving an impaired driver, according to data.
• Today’s high-potency pot also contributes to psychosis, research shows, and pot use beginning earlier in life can play a role in the emergence of violent behavior.
• A study last year by the pro-marijuana National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws ranked Colorado second in per-capita adult use of marijuana, just behind Oregon – the state that legalized recreational pot on the same day as Colorado.
• Similarly, a study by the University Colorado Boulder and the University of Minnesota showed that marijuana use rose nearly 25% in states where recreational marijuana is legal compared with states where it is banned.

But Hickenlooper seems to ignore such hard truths. He evidently prefers the softer, alternative reality peddled by Big Marijuana’s lobby, whose reps were awkwardly quoted at length in his Thursday news release praising his new bill.

He instead should have consulted fellow Colorado officeholder John Suthers, who has weighed in often on the marijuana debate with his characteristic common sense. Suthers – a onetime district attorney, Colorado attorney general, U.S. attorney and now Colorado Springs mayor – shared this grim prophecy with us this year:

“Big Tobacco threw around tons of money for years … Big Marijuana makes Big Tobacco look like amateurs. In 15 years, when the health impacts of high-potency marijuana are known, we’ll see the trial lawyers making a fortune suing Big Marijuana. They’ll say, ‘You knew it was dangerous, but you hid it.’ Just like Big Tobacco.”

And if Hickenlooper’s bill becomes law, it’ll help make trial lawyers rich not only in Colorado but from sea to shining sea.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board