While it’s true that cannabis is one of very few issues where the major political parties find some common ground, on both sides of the question, it should come as no surprise that, as the Republican Party gets nuttier and nuttier, the things Republicans say about weed become ever more outlandish.
The latest bit of lunacy came recently from J.D. Vance, who has been spewing all kinds of weird stuff since Donald Trump picked him as his running mate, while other weird stuff he’s said in the past has come to light. For instance, he believes that “childless cat ladies” have “no stake” in America, and that “post-menopausal” women are useless unless they’re helping to raise grandchildren.
Compared to that kind of stuff, his thoughts about pot might seem almost normal. But they’re really not. On Aug. 16, Vance appeared at an event put on by the Milwaukee Police Association—the cop union. There, he claimed that a cop had told him that “we’ve got fentanyl in our marijuana bags that our teenagers are using.”
This either didn’t happen or the cop who supposedly said that to Vance made it up. The “pot laced with dangerous drugs” myth is a very old trope. As a parent of “three young kids,” Vance told Milwaukee’s finest, he was “certain” that “one day, one of my kids is going to take something or do something that I don’t want them to take. But I don’t want that mistake to ruin their life.”
That’s rather hard to parse, but it seems like Vance is convinced that his kids—now ages seven, four and three—will one day smoke weed, and he’s very worried that there might be fentanyl in “the marijuana bags” that their kids will eventually get their pot in.
While anybody can lace anything with anything, and weed with other drugs mixed into it is not unheard of—though usually with the consent of the user—the story of fentanyl-laced weed came about simply because fentanyl is the most recent scare-drug for prohibitionist types who know that everyone by now knows how relatively harmless pot itself is. At the moment, fentanyl is the scariest thing they can conjure up. You might have seen the stories of people declaring, falsely, that merely touching the stuff can kill you.
Last year, New York State’s Office of Cannabis Management reported that there have been zero confirmed cases of fentanyl-laced pot.
Meanwhile, the obvious response to this myth is to note that legalization would solve the whole thing. Nobody at the local dispensary is likely to lace their strawberry kush with hard drugs.
Vance’s record on cannabis is mixed-to-negative, if that even matters. He has generally opposed reform bills that make it to Congress, but he has also stated that states should be allowed to legalize and that criminal convictions for pot crimes should be expunged. But he’s also said that using weed can “lead to violence.”
In Milwaukee, Vance’s weirdness continued. He blamed President Joe Biden’s “border policies” for this fentanyl-containing cannabis that worries him so. And in another hard-to-parse statement, he declared that “I want [kids] to learn from it. I want their parents to be able to punish them. I don’t want our kids to make mistakes on American streets and have it take their lives away from them.”
Most often, such myths seem to originate with cops and prosecutors. Since people in those positions are widely seen as trustworthy, and are often quoted with no pushback by credulous journalists, the myths take off and become part of the national political dialogue. Last year, Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida proposed an amendment to direct the Government Accountability Office to study the fake problem of fentanyl-laced weed. Buchanan’s colleagues quickly put the kibosh on that.
And what happened after Vance’s appearance before the Milwaukee Police Association, where he spewed a bunch of lies and made a bunch of weird statements about weed and other things? The police union endorsed the Trump-Vance ticket, of course.
