3.3 million joints a day are Mississippi Math

Governor Tate Reeves on marijuana

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axw307LCs04&ab_channel=TheHill

Caution! According to Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, all hell would break loose if the Mississippi smoked up to 3.3 million joints a day.

Wait what Where did he get those 3.3 million joints a day from? He got it from an imaginary scenario based on the current medical marijuana law they are working on in the state. On December 20, he answered a question about the bill in which he started chatting about hypotheses and creating statistics from scratch. To be honest, this is one of the most instinctive depictions of non-cannabis smokers making guesses about what it means to use cannabis for medicinal or even recreational purposes.

In addition, throughout his television appearance, he used the words “I believe” and “I think” to convey his opinion on what constitutes one thing: do you vote for officials to “guess” how things “might” go? Probably not. We want our elected “leaders” to be the people who have access to the data we farmers don’t and who make decisions that benefit most of their constituents.

Instead, we get people like Reeves pulling imaginary stats out of his ass to block something he thinks would be “detrimental”. Has he ever decided to do serious research on the subject? Of course not, that would be wise. He’d rather spit out stale, decades-long frenzy to support his hypothesis.

In today’s article, we’re going to rip a new asshole (figuratively) Governor Tate Reeves apart using your day-to-day logic and reasoning. Let’s begin.

“They want you to call it medical marijuana”

Right outside the door, the governor is trying to worsen the medical benefits of cannabis by saying, “The marijuana bill … YOU want you to call it a medical marijuana bill, but I’ll call it what it is … a marijuana -Bill …”

He then commended the lawmakers drafting the bill for reducing some of the things he thought were “too potty-wise” for Mississippi. The truth is that even recreational cannabis can be considered medicine if it helps people manage stress and anxiety, relieve their pain, and help them fall asleep.

Of course, people like Reeves would rather take medication to solve all of these problems, which can have some serious side effects. He thinks he knows more about your body than you do because you know … “science”.

“When 10% of Mississippi residents have a marijuana card “- MAGICK!

Next, Reeves began comparing Oklahoma to Mississippi and found that 10% of Oklahoma residents are in a medical marijuana program, and if his state followed suit, it would mean up to 300,000 medical marijuana patients in the state.

This is where the mathematical magic begins …

Now that we have a number of potential users, let’s take into account that the bill “as it stands” he grinned … you would be consuming up to 3.5 grams a day.

Then he probably said one of my favorite lines a politician has ever said;

“Proponents of this bill love to talk about colored pencils, and they love to talk about … uh … a lot of things that no one fully understands … – Governor Tate Reeves

You don’t quite understand colored pencils? What is not to be understood? I didn’t even see what the “bill advocates” had to say, but based on what Reeves is talking about, I concluded that they were using colored pencils to indicate how much cannabis would be in terms of weight and size. It would be a visual example of the crowd.

Even so, Reeves had a better example.

He went and took the guess that the average joint weighs about 0.3 grams, which means that by his estimates 3.5 grams would make about 10-11 joints. With a simple multiplication and using his projected estimate of potential users in his state – that would be 3.3 million joints a day.

That’s 99 million a month! And 1.18 BILLION. JOINTS PER YEAR!

“How could that be medical” or so he claimed.

The problem with his math …

The thing about math is it only takes a single change to any variable to get the result. First, Reeves uses the estimate that a joint weighs about 0.3 grams, a number that could be officially accepted but does not meet industry standards. The average joint for a consumer is usually similar to that of a cigarette, containing around 0.8-0.9 grams. That would cut the number of joints to 3-4 per day – not 10-11.

Second, I have been using cannabis for over twenty years and while I may have smoked more than 3-4 joints a day for a while, I don’t think I have ever been able to consistently smoke 10-11 joints a day. Nowadays I smoke 1-2 a day and some days I don’t even smoke.

When it comes to medicinal cannabis, consumption is usually higher – but that doesn’t mean they also smoke 10-11 joints a day consistently.

The problem with his claims

Reeves also claimed that there will be less “fit” people eligible for employment because they either would;

1. Be too lazy because they are stoners

2. Fail a drug test

Of these, A is statistically incorrect since there is no reduction in productivity in states that have legalized recreational cannabis. In fact, people take fewer sick days when they have medical marijuana available.

And for B, you solve that by making discrimination against cannabis users illegal in the workplace. Not to mention, the presence of a medical cannabis market will also create more jobs.

He also said that he thinks “crime will increase” – which is again not true. There is indeed evidence that pharmacies reduce crime by removing market dynamics from the black market and moving them to a controlled regulated market.

Bottom line

When you have executives who are obviously biased towards a particular narrative, you get people like Gov. Reeves, who draw statistics from hypothetical realities that do not match reality. When you’re in Mississippi – do you really want this guy to run things? Reeves is an example of how cannabis policy and bans have gone on for so long … maybe it’s time to stop voting for these people?

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