Kentucky Gov. Bevin Opposes Medical Marijuana Claiming It Causes Homelessness and Disease

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin has some strange ideas about marijuana.

In an interview with WKDZ on July 31, the one-term Republican governor stated he opposes legalizing recreational or medical marijuana in the Bluegrass State because cannabis leads to spikes in homelessness and emergency room visits and causes unnamed diseases.

Bevin on the Problems Legal Cannabis Has Allegedly Created in Colorado Since 2014

“Look at the homelessness, look at the increases in their emergency rooms, look at the problems they have with law enforcement of bordering states. Look at the amount of disease and things that have spiked up as a result of people who are coming for the fact that they can smoke pot legally. Does that mean everybody who’s involved in that has these problems? No. But many of them do. So we have negative things to counter as well.»

Bevin on Replenishing the State’s Pension Fund with Sales Taxes from Legal Marijuana

«Everybody in Kentucky would need to smoke pot for the next 600 years. And no one is allowed to retire in the next 600 years or allowed to incur any more interest or any more liability, and then in 600 years of pot smoking, if we did indeed allocate 100% of the money, then we would now have enough money to fund what we owe today in 2019. It’s not a serious solution. It’s not even a solution at all. It’s a ridiculous proposal.»

Bevin on Alleged Rampant Marijuana Overdoses in Colorado

In 2017 Bevin contended that emergency rooms in Colorado are filled with people suffering from marijuana overdoses: “THC content in marijuana is not like it was even a generation ago. There are people overdosing based on ingestion of products that are edibles and things. You have that state being sued by at least two of their border states. You have law enforcement people in emergency rooms being overrun by problems. You have homelessness spiking in that state. It has not been good for that state, and states like us would be wise to look at that and realize that’s a sucker’s bet.”

On the contrary, legal cannabis has been a boon in Colorado. More than 40,000 jobs have been created since 2012 and, in 2018, $263.7 million in tax revenue from marijuana sales was generated.

Bevin, who was barely elected in 2015 (he won by less than a 1% margin), is running for re-election in November against the state’s current attorney general, Democratic Andy Bashear.

Bevin’s Opponent Andy Bashear on Medical Marijuana

At Bashear’s campaign website: «I support placing medical marijuana legalization on the ballot as a constitutional amendment and would vote in its favor. I would vote for it because I’ve seen the impact opioids have had on every Kentucky community. So many Kentucky families have seen a loved one fall into addiction, and their lives have been devastated. If medical marijuana is an alternative and gives people the chance to get pain relief without being subjected to opioids, I think it’s something we’ve got to explore.»

Cannabis supporters in Kentucky should get behind Andy Bashear and vote Matt Bevin out of office on Nov. 5.

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