Article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.

Youngstown, OH – While speaking at a town hall meeting this weekend, Chelsea Clinton made the ridiculous claim that marijuana is killing people. She claimed that legalization in Colorado has led to deaths, despite the fact that there has never been a marijuana overdose on record.
Clinton suggested that marijuana can cause reactions with other drugs. However, marijuana is safer than most pills that are prescribed by doctors.
Speaking to a crowd of impressionable students, Clinton said, “We also have anecdotal evidence now from Colorado where some of the people who were taking marijuana for those purposes, the coroner believes, after they died, there was drug interactions with other things they were taking.”

Chelsea Clinton implies here that marijuana can kill you. Uhh pic.twitter.com/cdBWGgDG5P

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) September 27, 2016

Her comments drew criticism from people who are concerned that these ideas could foreshadow her mother’s drug policy. In her speech, she did allude to her mother’s stance on the issue, saying that “We just need so much more data than we have so that people who might benefit have the chance to benefit, people who might be in danger are protected. So absolutely my mom strongly supports the need for more rigorous study and then subjecting it, as we do kind of everything else that might have a medicinal purpose, to FDA approval, scrutiny and ultimately regulation.”
None of the claims that Clinton made can be substantiated, and there is actually plenty of evidence to disprove what she said.
As The Free Thought Project has extensively documented, since legalization took place in Colorado, violent crime is down, teenage drug use is down, addiction to prescription pharmaceuticals is down, the number of total car accidents in the state has declined, and there has been a massive boom in economic growth as well.
With all of this evidence, it becomes clear that the citizens, in states where police can kidnap, cage and kill them for this plant, are nothing short of oppressed. When a person would deprive another human being of their life and liberty for their personal choice which harms no one, they become the criminal. Legislation is no measure of morality.

In reality, a prohibition of any kind is a scam, and the drug war is a racket of many prohibitions. What the drug war actually accomplishes is the establishment of black markets and gangs, the erosion of personal liberties, the expansion of the prison system and prison population as well as a constant excuse for frivolous government spending. This hypothesis has been tested time and time again, anytime throughout history where a ruling power has prohibited the consumption or possession of any item whatsoever.
This process was made quite clear during the alcohol prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s. As we saw with alcohol prohibition, making a substance illegal does nothing to stifle its use, but simply creates outlaws out of nonviolent people and foments a culture of violence that the rest of society is forced to deal with, even if they have no interest at all in the banned substance.
Prohibitions of any kind should be opposed, for the reasons I have laid out in the past. However, marijuana is of a specific immediate importance because of its ability to heal sick people and create more environmentally friendly industrial products. It is also one of the safest drugs known to our species.
The only thing a marijuana user has to fear from using marijuana — is the state. It is time to end the war on drugs.

Join us today and help to bring an end to this madness.