The word is out that our state’s experience with legalized retail marijuana has kicked Coloradans in the shins. In fact, the bad news about Big Marijuana has made it all the way into the Times of London, which has been doing eyeopening reporting on how pot’s high has become a downer in U.S. states that have legalized it. Especially the Centennial State.

This week, in a “Dispatch from Denver” story, a Times headline asks, “Is America turning its back on the great legal weed experiment?” The story picks up with a profile of disillusioned Colorado pot-repreneur Sean Azzariti, who over a decade ago became the first legal recreational pot customer in U.S. history. Now, as the Times describes it, he is having doubts.

“Disillusioned with the industry in Colorado, now home to empty storefronts and plunging sales, he laments the decline of an industry that was expected to alleviate suffering and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars,” the account notes.

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“I don’t think it’s gone well,” Azzariti told the Times. “I’ve seen a slow decay over the last several years, especially since we legalized recreational use.”

He adds, “From my personal experience, the best days of the cannabis industry in Colorado were when it was medical only.”

The news report details some of the broader ill effects of the retail pot industry and the culture it spawns.

There’s the industry’s slump and its overall failure to meet expectations: “The downturn has taken a large toll on the state’s tax revenues, while pushing many entrepreneurs out of business. As of July, the number of licenses issued by the state was down 14%, year on year, while cannabis jobs fell by 16% last year, according to Vangst, an industry recruitment website.”

There also are the more insidious and fundamental repercussions: “Last year a state report found that 10% of adults were using cannabis daily or near-daily, a ‘significant increase’ from 2014.” And, “Since recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana more than doubled, from 55 in 2013 to 131 people killed in 2020, according to the National Library of Medicine.”

So, it’s no surprise, as the Times reports, a Gallup poll last month, “found that American attitudes to the drug had hardened in the past two years. A slim majority now say marijuana harms society as a whole (54%) and the people who use it (51%).”

The report also takes note of demands to ratchet down retail pot’s permissible THC level “after rising substantially over recent decades. High-potency marijuana has been linked to a greater risk of psychosis and addiction. In some cases it has been linked to suicide.” (In July, the Times had recounted in another news report a California incident in which a young woman, in the grips of cannabis-induced psychosis, killed a friend — stabbing him 108 times.)

All of which is not to mention the threat pot poses to Colorado’s youth.

Such woes are depressingly familiar to Coloradans, of course. The Gazette has reported on them faithfully and weighed in on them editorially.

But it’s encouraging to see our state’s often-bitter experiences with marijuana at least serve as words of warning to a wider audience. It’s an audience that may still harbor illusions that pot is a panacea for everything from PTSD to dwindling government coffers. It is in reality a plague that poisons the well for a broad swath of society.

Propagandists will continue to sing pot’s praises as ever more of the world learns the truth.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board