Columns

So, who do you believe?
Chuck Smith, writing for Coloradopolitics.com in July, cited a few studies stating that not only have traffic accidents in Colorado not increased since recreational marijuana has been legalized in the state, they actually have decreased. He went on to say that there was an immediate decline in car deaths following legalization.
On the other hand, an NBC report said that in a study across 20 states where marijuana sales have been legalized, weed was detected at three times the rate in the bodies of dead drivers compared to those in the year prior to legalization.
Seems this argument has been going back and forth for years.
Maybe, in the infancy of legalization, there's not enough recognition of the effects of this drug.

Ecocide: “the extensive damage to…ecosystem(s) of a given territory…to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished.”
  ~Wikipedia

When Winifred Colby of Montrose fell ill while attending the last day of the Highgraders Holiday a few Sundays ago in Ouray, she was later most distraught about not being able to find out who won the events. She was helped to her car, she said, by Ouray resident, mining veteran and firefighter Steve Martinez and made her way home.
This week, she called me to get a copy of the paper with the results, insisting to pay for it.
Winifred — I'll use her first name because I can't imagine she's ever met a stranger — is 80 years old and told me that she can't remember what she had for breakfast, but she remembers long-ago details as crisply as a fall day.
Her father, Bud Wood, was a firefighter in Pueblo. He was also a war-time trainer, and one of his tasks was to teach Western Slope firefighters how to handle Japanese incendiary bombs.
"They flew them here on balloons, you know," Winifred told me.
No, I didn't know.

A new National Academy of Sciences study concludes the planet is facing a real threat of “biological annihilation.” The scientists who carried out the research call the decimation of the world’s large mam- mals a “global epidemic” and say the rate of decline is accelerating.
Up to 50 percent of all individual ani- mals have been lost in recent decades. Two-fifths of the 177 mammal species sur- veyed lost more than 80 percent of their range or geographic distribution between 1900 and 2016.
The release of this study coincides with news that the world’s population has reached an all-time high of 7.6 billion. In Asia, the world’s most populous continent, three-fourths of the mammal species sur- veyed have lost 80 percent of their range in the last century or so.
The fact that animal and human popu- lations are moving in opposite directions is unsettling but not surprising.