From self-reflective rock gods to hemp-friendly senate majority leaders, here are the week’s most notable cannabis quotables.
“If you show up at the sheriff’s office with drugs, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get arrested.”
—Sheriff Jason Mosher of the Vernon County Sheriff’s Office, speaking to Missouri’s FOX4KC about the woman arrested after allegedly attempting to smuggle a Bible filled will cannabis and methamphetamine into a county jail
“I was wrong and I was not informed. I’ve been dismissive of cannabis. And I didn’t know much about it. I just dismissed it out of hand. I have to man up and admit in the past, I used to dismiss lots of things because of ignorance and arrogance. About three years ago when I did my own research, I found out astonishingly new information that doctors and researchers were talking about with regards to cannabis.”
—Gene Simmons, longtime KISS bassist and brand-new Chief Evangelical Officer for the Canadian cannabis company Invictus, to Toronto Sun
“While marijuana may also have some negative consequences [on the brain], it definitely is nowhere near the negative consequences of alcohol.”
—Kent Hutchison, professor of behavioral neuroscience at CU Boulder and co-director of the CU Change Lab, whose comparative study of the effects of cannabis and alcohol on the brain was published in the journal Addiction
“Despite the perception that synthetic cannabinoids are safe and a legal alternative to marijuana, many are illegal and can cause severe illness. The recent cases of severe bleeding are evidence of the harm synthetic cannabinoids can cause.”
—Nirav D. Shah, director of theIllinois Department of Public Health, discussing the state’s 30-plus cases of severe bleeding brought on by synthetic cannabis, to Patch.com
“We can begin by immediately removing one area of racial injustice in our criminal justice system. Let’s legalize, tax and regulate marijuana.”
—JB Pritzker, who this week won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Illinois (via Forbes)
“We all are so optimistic that industrial hemp can become sometime in the future what tobacco was in Kentucky’s past.”
—US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), announcing his plans to introduce legislation to legalize hemp as an “agricultural commodity”
“We found no evidence that poverty has either increased or decreased in Pueblo as a result of cannabis legalization. … Apart from anecdotal reports, we did not find definitive evidence that links increased homelessness to legal cannabis.”
—From the “Pueblo County Impact Study,” conducted by Colorado’s Institute of Cannabis Research
