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Vail Daily letter: Get over it

As I read Christine Arakelian’s letter to the editor, “You have to choose,” I could picture and hear Barbara Allen and all of her marijuana apocalypse saying, “See, we told you so — families aren’t going to come to Vail because of legal marijuana.”

I knew that I could no longer read this stuff without pointing out how incredibly naive and hypocritical Christine and everyone who thinks like her is and continues to be.

First I’ll address how naive and out of touch you are. The reality is that large numbers of people have been smoking marijuana in Colorado for decades. If you didn’t know that the state has had that reputation for its marijuana consumption for decades you can take that to be an indication of just how naive you are. Buddy Sims was fond of asking where people are going to smoke since most hotels are non-smoking and the resort is on federal land where marijuana is still technically illegal. He thought it was a real clever question that put people favoring legalization on the spot. It’s not, because the answer is so very simple. Locals and visitors are going to smoke their legal marijuana in the same places they have been smoking illegal marijuana for the past 40 years. And that is the point that I really want to drive home — this has been going on for decades. None of you had any idea and things where just fine, but now you know that people are having fun that you won’t allow yourself to have, doing it legally and it really makes you angry. One more thing — there are high people around you all the time and you don’t know it.



Now I’ll address your hypocrisy. All of you are concerned about the youth and safety in general with marijuana being legal, but none of you say a single thing about alcohol. Christina was upset by conversations she heard regarding recreational drug use. I have no doubt that Christina heard multiple conversations about people abusing alcohol, but that’s perfectly fine. Go ahead and talk about abusing a substance that will cause you to forget what happened, make you vomit and possibly kill you if you consume too much, but for God’s sake don’t talk about smoking a plant that is essentially impossible to overdose on. There are only two bars near my home in West Vail, but I cannot walk my dog Friday, Saturday or Sunday morning without encountering piles of vomit left by over-served bar patrons from the night before. Why isn’t anyone writing to the paper about closing down the bars and banning liquor stores from the town of Vail? Alcohol is obviously just as dangerous to youth and the safety of all as marijuana. If you are going to be upset about legal marijuana in Vail you also need to be vocal about alcohol; otherwise you are hypocrite.

To those unhappy about legal marijuana, get over it. Things are as they’ve been for decades.

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