A major goal of NPD in the 2022 election was to provide an alternative to candidates who had opposed the legalization of cannabis in the 2020-2022 session of the General Assembly, when legalization bills passed in both chambers but failed to muster sufficient votes to override Governor John Carney's veto.
In support of DCAN's long time effort to end cannabis prohibition, we have once again gotten legalization bills through the Delaware General Assembly and they are now once again on John Carney's desk awaiting his decision in the face of over 70% public support. This time though, the votes that sent the bills to his desk will be enough to override him if he vetoes them, which will make him the first Delaware governor in the 21st century to have a veto overridden.
He doesn't have to do it though. Under the Delaware Constitution, unless the General Assembly adjourns, a bill that is not explicitly vetoed becomes law in 10 days (excluding Sundays, of course) unless it is signed sooner. So these bills will become law by Carney's inaction.
We didn't get his inaction last year though. Last year, the bills passed on smaller margins and he vetoed them, and there were not enough votes to override him. This year there was, so our hope is that even if he maintains his stubborn unwillingness to sign them, that he will not want to veto them and take an ignominious place in history.
We are not powerless in this interval. The legislators that opposed these bills did so based on flimsy arguments using cherry-picked and fabricated data. The weakness of these arguments must continue to be exposed and we must continue to pressure the governor and members of the General Assembly to let these bills become law. Carney is far less likely to try a veto if he is assured his veto will be overridden.
The arguments are largely as tired and unoriginal as they were for prohibition when it was first implemented. The Gateway Theory continues to be trotted out as if the percentage of hard drug users that used cannabis first has any more bearing on how likely cannabis users are to begin using hard drugs than the number of hard drug users who drank water first or who breathed oxygen first. The logical trap is clearly an easy one to fall into, but that all squares are rectangles does not make all rectangles squares.
Several of the so-called "studies" trotted out by opponents to claim that cannabis use is linked to everything from increases in fatal traffic accidents to child abuse to schizophrenia and violence engage in correlational fallacies that attribute the presence of cannabis in a situation as the cause of that situation without any empirical basis for doing so.
Others also demonstrate the danger of relying on citations of "scientific studies" without taking the peer review process into account or actually considering the methodologies of these studies. Of particular note are studies related to motor vehicle accidents "related" to cannabis. Not only do many of these studies conflate testing positive for THC metabolites with impairment when metabolites can be detected for several weeks after any impairment has faded, but they deliberately ignore positive tests for more immediately impairing drugs like alcohol and prescription drugs as well as a shift in methodologies for compiling these statistics where cannabis was not routinely tested for prior to legalization, but after legalization it was, leading to an increase in the detection rate that is not reflective of an increase in the number of impaired or even metabolite-positive drivers.
All this aside from the even more obviously nonsensical claims like the one from Senator Bryant Richardson that 50% of males who use cannabis become violent or Senator Dave Lawson insisting that legal cannabis use is "just wrong" and it is the job of Delaware politicians to be "the adults" and tell us no when we demand the freedom to exercise our rights in peace.
Contact John Carney:
(302) 744-4101
https://bit.ly/GovCarney
Contact your legislators:
https://bit.ly/YesonHB1and2
Don't let up on them until HB1 and HB2 become law!
