As he considers a 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is continuing to defend his controversial positions on several issues. Speaking yesterday at the United States Naval Academy's 2019 Leadership Conference in Annapolis, Maryland, Bloomberg explained why he opposes marijuana legalization and still believes "stop and frisk" was a good idea.
Bloomberg's stances aren't anything new. But they're a good reminder that, as Reason's Scott Shackford argued in October, the possible presidential candidate is no lover of liberty.
For one thing, Bloomberg remains vociferously opposed to weed, appearing to tie drug overdose deaths to marijuana legalization. "Last year, in 2017, 72,000 Americans OD'd on drugs," he said, according to CNN's Donald Judd. "In 2018, more people than that are ODing on drugs, have OD'd on drugs, and today incidentally, we are trying to legalize another addictive narcotic, which is perhaps the stupidest thing we've ever done," he declared, presumably talking about marijuana. "We've got to fight that," Bloomberg added.
According to Bloomberg, marijuana is a deadly narcotic like herion or morphine.
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Bloomberg was likely referencing Centers for Disease Control statistics showing that 72,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2017. But it's hard to see how that relates to marijuana legalization. As I pointed out in December, the Drug Enforcement Agency did not report any deaths from marijuana in 2017.
Moreover, numerous studies (six of which Reason's C.J. Ciaramella rounded up last February), show that opioid addiction does not start with marijuana. For more on the "gateway drug" myth, you can read Jacob Sullum's comprehensive dive into the subject here.
But Bloomberg has long been ignorant when it comes to weed. In 2013, he called medical marijuana "one of the greatest hoaxes of all time," despite endless evidence to the contrary.
Thousands of those arrests came courtesy of another controversial stance that Bloomberg defended yesterday: stop and frisk. Under that program, police would detain and search citizens based on a reasonable suspicion they were armed.
Stop and frisk was also unconstitutional — police shouldn't be able to stop people without probable cause. And as a federal judge ruled in 2013, the program affected mostly innocent people and minorities. "Nearly 90 percent of the people stopped are released without the officer finding any basis for a summons or arrest," wrote then-Judge Shira Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, according to The New York Times.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, said yesterday that "we certainly did not pick somebody by race." Rather, police "went to a place where there was somebody that had been murdered…and that's where you looked for kids who might have a gun." Of course, that's hardly good enough justification to stop and pat down tens of thousands of innocent people.
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