Donnelly: Clark County Council has good reasons to resist marijuana sales

The May 30 council work session gave marijuana industry advocates led by Jim Mullen, owner of three Herbery shops and president of the Washington CannaBusiness Association, ample time to demonstrate that their operations would be safe for kids. Yet, the Herbery itself has reportedly fallen short on at least two occasions by selling to minors.

Pot sales in the county would hardly be a financial windfall. Mark Gassaway, county finance director, projected the lost revenue from the moratorium at $750,000 in 2020, less than 1 percent of the county budget.

Of the many risks and costs, some are easy to quantify. Sgt. Bill Sofianos, supervisor of the Clark-Vancouver Regional Drug Task Force, presented data showing pot shops eliciting far more calls to police than adjacent businesses. “We rarely, if ever, get the phone calls saying, ‘I’m really glad my neighbors are smoking marijuana,’ ” he said.

Sofianos testified that “it is clear that marijuana mixed with other substances … is contributing to fatal crashes in Washington.” After legalization in Colorado, a Denver Post investigation showed a 145 percent increase in fatal crashes involving pot-impaired drivers between 2013 and 2016. Twenty-two percent of fatally injured motorists who were tested for drugs tested positive for marijuana in 2016, according to a May 31 Governors Highway Safety Association study.

I attended the May 30 hearing to advocate for families coping with mental illness. Legal pot presents dangerous temptation for the mentally ill. It counteracts their medications, drains their scarce funds, and may make them homeless.

Perhaps the biggest societal risk of normalizing pot use is the connection between youth pot consumption and schizophrenia. “There is a strong association between cannabis use and schizophrenia but the underlying cellular links are poorly understood,” according to a team of scientists writing in April’s edition of Nature. Autism and intellectual disability may be involved.

September’s Scientific American reported, “The link between adolescent pot smoking and psychosis strengthens.”

“If your friends jumped off a roof, would you do it too?” Our mothers pounded that question home. The fact that Vancouver and Battle Ground have marijuana shops, or that downtown Seattle is full of brazen pot smokers, does Clark County have to follow?

Council members should let more data accumulate on health and safety impacts — areas where the county pays the bills — before lifting the moratorium.