For President George H. W. Bush, it was his 1988 campaign pledge, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” that haunted him. Pundits said when he later broke that promise as president, in a budget compromise with congressional Democrats, it helped doom his 1992 reelection bid.

For Gov. Jared Polis – a rumored presidential hopeful – the famous last words that undo his political aspirations could turn out to be, “While opioids killed more than 80,000 people last year, cannabis use killed no one.”

The sentence appears in a letter Polis signed onto with five fellow Democratic governors, urging President Biden on Tuesday to follow through on prior steps by his administration to downgrade the federal criminal status of marijuana. As reported this week by Colorado Politics, the push to “reschedule” pot is intended to remove banking barriers and other financial and legal hurdles to the marijuana industry in states like Colorado, where it’s legal.

It’s still fashionable in Polis’ political circles to gloss over the growing body of data on pot’s perils; to point out, instead, the presumed public benefit of taxing legalized marijuana, and to boast of regulatory safeguards that supposedly keep pot sales out of kids’ hands. Oh, and of course to refer to marijuana as “cannabis” – as the letter does – per its rebranding by Big Marijuana’s well-oiled lobby to erase pot’s long-standing and much-deserved stigma.

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Yet, it all amounts to whistling past the graveyard. There is mounting evidence, and a consensus in the medical world, about the devastating impact of marijuana use on our youth’s mental health. Ebbing tax revenue from legal pot sales in Colorado is turning into a few drops in the budgetary bucket. And it has become as easy for a 13- or 14-year-old in our state to acquire a small plastic jar of legally retailed, super-potent pot concentrate – as a can of beer.

Meanwhile, the numbers don’t lie.

According to the Colorado Department of Health and Environment’s Violent Death Reporting System, 42.9% of Colorado teens 15-19 years old who die by suicide have marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient, THC, in their system at the time of death. For Hispanic teens in that age range, the number climbs to 49%. For Black teens, stunningly, it’s almost 67%.

Alongside that are pot’s casualties on our roadways. The state’s Department of Public Safety has said overall detection rates for THC among impaired drivers went from 18% in 2016 to 29% in 2022. The department has also seen a gradual rise over the same time period for drivers who test positive for THC at the 5 mg/ml level. About one out of every three drivers convicted of a DUI in 2020 was involved in a crash, the department says. And those crash rates increased for drivers who tested positive for both alcohol and THC, to about 36%. For those who tested positive for alcohol, THC and another drug, it increased to 39%.

Polis and the other governors claim to want to, “make cannabis as safe as it can be for adult consumers while simultaneously protecting our children.” Clearly, Colorado has failed.

Which is why the governors’ attempt in their letter to cleverly contrast the toll of opioids like fentanyl with that of marijuana is not only insultingly glib – but also just plain false. Pot kills.

Could our governor – usually cautious and politically astute – have been unaware that such fast-and-loose verbiage about marijuana’s inherent dangers might backfire on him? Or, had he simply overlooked that line before affixing his signature?

Either way, it’s a safe bet the next time he reads it, he’ll wince.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board