More Americans now consume marijuana on a daily basis than drink alcohol every day, according to a recent study.

That’s welcome news for an industry that has been unfairly demonized by opportunistic politicians since the days of Nixon. The findings — based on data gathered between 1979 and 2022— are consistent with the wave of decriminalization under state laws, notably with California’s Proposition 215 back in 1996.

After the election that year, a law professor at Loyola was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying “this may be the baby boomers taking control.”

It wasn’t the boomers prevailing, but pragmatism.

About 1.3 million people in the U.S. are in state prisons. The most common reason for incarceration? Drug-related crimes. Given how much the country with the highest prison population loves pot, it makes sense to stop throwing people in jail for doing weed.

Today the only states where cannabis is totally illegal are Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina and Wyoming. Earlier this month President Biden announced plans to reclassify pot as a less dangerous drug.

In short: “Just say no” is dead. Long live “pass the dutchie ’pon the left-hand side.”

The next important step in having policy actually reflect society would be for Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign the “munchie bill” that’s likely to be headed his way soon.

Last year Assembly Bill 374 — which would make it legal for dispensaries to become cafes and offer food as well as host live events — passed the Assembly 66-9 and the Senate 33-3.

Surprisingly, Newsom vetoed the bipartisan bill in October, citing concerns about providing a smoke-free work environment for employees. That seems nonsensical, considering that it is already legal to consume marijuana in California dispensaries. AB 374 would have just made it possible to buy a bag of chips while you do it.

Marijuana cafes have existed in Amsterdam since the 1970s. Last summer I spent a few hours listening to music and eating homemade desserts at the first marijuana cafe in North America. Fittingly called New Amsterdam Cafe, the popular hangout opened in Vancouver in 1998 and is as chill as Issa Rae’s Hilltop Coffee.

However, vibes are not the only reasons Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) introduced AB 374. For him it’s also a matter of fairness and trying to level the playing field.

“Small businesses have to follow every rule, and yet you’re telling them they can’t adapt and innovate and offer something people want,” he said. “The ones who follow the rules should be able to offer an experience. People pay a lot to sit in a winery. We have cigar lounges. This is really no different.”

Despite law enforcement’s best efforts, illegal pot is estimated to have pulled in more than $8 billion in 2020 compared with $4 billion for legal. However, it’s the small-business owners who also have the burden of taxes, regulations and fines. All of which eats away at profits and businesses’ ability to grow. Haney said his proposal not only would allow small business owners to diversify their income stream, but also would encourage people to come out of their post-pandemic cocoons and socialize again.

California began liberating cannabis culture in 1996. It’s only right the state continues to correct a narrative that was born not from science but from President Nixon’s prejudice. It’s because of that cloud hanging over cannabis that advocates of decriminalization had to sweeten the deal for voters by promising a financial windfall for the state, which of course is why legal pot is ridiculously overtaxed.

Haney said he knows the cafes won’t solve all of the problems that dispensary owners face because of competition from the black market, but it would at least provide owners with more ways to make money. Haney said he worked with both Newsom’s office and the Department of Cannabis Control before reintroducing the bill. He said the new version, AB 1775, addresses the governor’s concern for the work environment, and it also has union support. It recently passed the Assembly 49-4 and is headed to the Senate.

My hope is that the munchie bill meets Newsom’s approval. With proper ventilation for employees and customers alike, marijuana cafes could provide local artists with new venues and add another branch of tourism.

“I’m one of the younger legislators, and I see how excited my friends are,” 42-year-old Haney told me. “I have a couple of colleagues who represent suburban districts and one came to me and said, ‘All the suburban moms are excited about your cannabis cafe bill.’ Post-pandemic, it’s been hard to get people to get out, and I think this just makes sense.”

It really does.

@LZGranderson

Former President Donald J. Trump has baselessly and publicly cast doubt about the fairness of the 2024 election about once a day, on average, since he announced his candidacy for president, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Though the tactic is familiar — Mr. Trump raised the specter of a “rigged” election in the 2016 and 2020 cycles, too — his attempts to undermine the 2024 contest are a significant escalation.

Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election had historic consequences. The so-called “Big Lie” — Mr. Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him — led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the United States Capitol and two of four criminal indictments against Mr. Trump, as well as his second impeachment.

But Mr. Trump had planted seeds of doubt among his followers long before Election Day, essentially setting up a no-lose future for himself: Either he would prevail, or the election would be rigged.

He has never given up that framing, which no evidence supports, even well after the end of his presidency. And as he seeks to return to the White House, the same claim has become the backbone of his campaign.

Long before announcing his candidacy, Mr. Trump and his supporters had been falsely claiming that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to target him. But it took until March of last year for Mr. Trump to settle on a new accusation: that the multiple legal challenges related to Mr. Trump’s business and political activities constituted a “new way of cheating” in order to “interfere” in the 2024 election. He has made versions of that accusation more than 350 times.

“This is a rigged deal, just as the 2020 election was rigged, and we can’t let them get away with it,” Mr. Trump said on Nov. 18, 2022, three days after announcing his 2024 candidacy. His comments were in response to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to supervise the Justice Department’s criminal investigations related to the events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot and Mr. Trump’s decision to keep classified documents at his Florida resort.

By last summer, Mr. Trump had honed the language and made it a staple of his stump speech: “They rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

The Times has documented more than 500 campaign events, social media posts and interviews during the 2024 cycle in which Mr. Trump falsely accused Democrats or others of trying to “rig,” “cheat,” “steal” or otherwise “influence” the next election — or of having done so in 2020.

Mr. Trump has adapted the specifics of his accusations with each of the three election cycles. But in each case, his pattern of discourse has followed the same contours. He sows doubt about the legitimacy of the election, and then begins to capitalize on that doubt by alluding to not necessarily accepting the election results — unless, of course, he wins.

This rhetorical strategy — heads, I win; tails, you cheated — is a beloved one for Mr. Trump that predates even his time as a presidential candidate. He called the Emmy Awards “a con game” after his television show “The Apprentice” failed to win in 2004 and 2005. And before he officially became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, he began to float the possibility that the primary contest was, as he said, “rigged and boss controlled.”

By May of that year, Mr. Trump spoke plainly about why he had stashed the argument away. “You’ve been hearing me say it’s a rigged system,” he said, “but now I don’t say it anymore because I won.”

Late that summer, with his sights set on the November general election, Mr. Trump tested out a new line, contending that “the media” was “rigging” the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. His assertions intensified in October after a recording surfaced of him speaking in vulgar terms about women.

“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in 2016, three weeks before Election Day. And though he would end up winning the Electoral College and the presidency, his failure to secure the popular vote led him to form a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to “prove” that rampant voter fraud was to blame.

In December 2019, well into Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives impeached him, saying he used the levers of government to solicit election assistance from Ukraine in the form of investigations to discredit Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump subsequently said that Democrats were using the “impeachment hoax” to “interfere” in the election.

The Covid-19 pandemic gave him a new rallying cry, centered on election integrity: Mail-in ballots were “dangerous,” “fraught with fraud” and were being used to “steal” and “rig” the election, he said.

About six weeks before Election Day in 2020, Mr. Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. “We want to make sure that the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” Mr. Trump said.

This time, it was half a year before Election Day 2024 — and after more than a year of pushing the “election interference” line about the criminal charges against him and repeatedly warning that Democrats are “cheating” — that Mr. Trump again placed conditions on his acceptance of election results.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” he said in a May 1 interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The controversial Equal Rights Amendment, which was on the ballot for the November elections in New York, has been tossed by a judge on procedural grounds.

The ruling is a victory for Republicans and opponents of the bill who say it was written too broadly and could trample parents’ rights when it comes to decisions like children receiving gender-affirming procedures.

The ERA was a rapid response by New York Democrats to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. The amendment passed both houses of the New York legislature in a special session just one week after the Dobbs decision was rendered.

The amendment, which advocates say is meant to enshrine women’s right to abortion in the Empire State, was passed so quickly that a judge in Livingston County determined the legislation was fatally flawed due to a procedural mistake.

NY BALLOT INITIATIVE COULD BLOCK PARENTS FROM SAY IN CHILD’S TRANS SURGERY, CRITICS WARN IN FIERY CAMPAIGN

Bobbie Anne Cox, the attorney who sued the legislature to stop the referendum, said, “They put forth this amendment to the constitution. There was no open debate. There was no public hearings, there was nothing.”

“They referred it to the AG that day, but then they voted that same day. They didn’t even wait one day,” Cox continued.

The New York constitution requires that a proposed amendment must be presented to the attorney general to ensure that the proposal is not in conflict with other provisions of the constitution. The AG has 20 days to respond.

The New York State Capitol (AP Photo/Hans Pennink/File)

DOCTOR DEFENDS GIVING TRANSGENDER TREATMENTS TO 8- AND 10-YEAR-OLDS: ‘RESPECT KIDS AS INDIVIDUALS’

Supreme Court Justice Daniel J. Doyle declared the amendment “null and void” because the Democrats did not wait for the AG’s analysis.

“For them to violate the constitution and to want to do that in order to change the constitution is not acceptable, in fact it’s dangerous for the people, for the citizens,” Cox said.

Following the decision, Democrats have promised an appeal. Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement, “Our decades-long fight to protect equality and reproductive freedom will not be thrown off track by one extremist judge and I look forward to casting my ballot for the Equal Rights Amendment in November.”

The Coalition to Protect Kids – New York says an upcoming ballot proposal would ban parents from approving their child’s transgender surgery. (Coalition to Protect Kids – New York)

GENDER DYSPHORIA GROWING AMONG YOUNGER ADULTS AMID ‘INCREASING ACCEPTANCE,’ STUDY FINDS

Opponents of the amendment include former House Republican John Faso, who praised the decision to toss the referendum, calling the amendment “a cynical maneuver to try to boost [voter] turnout based on a false premise that abortion is at risk.”

Faso pointed to the legislature’s adoption of abortion rights legislation in 1970. He said the ERA goes far beyond guaranteeing a right to abortion.

“It would, for instance, give a minor a right to so-called gender-affirming care, puberty blockers even surgeries, without permission, without consent of their parents,” Faso said.

“It would also, for instance, say that biological males could compete on girls sports teams,” he added.

“Any decent lawyer will take one look at the Proposition One language and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,” Greg Garvey, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect Kids – New York, a group “dedicated to defeating the Equal Rights Amendment,” said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“This ballot initiative is written so broadly and so poorly that it could cause irreparable harm to children and families,” he continued. “This is no soft-sounding equal rights amendment, it’s nothing less than the parent replacement act.”

Democrat MaryJane Shimsky, a member of the New York State Assembly and advocate for the referendum, pushed back on opponents’ criticism, saying, “We need the ERA now precisely because of the extremists who would scapegoat children for political gain and the dangers their culture wars are creating in our communities.”

“New Yorkers know that we are stronger together and when we stand up for each other,” Shimsky continued. “Should the ERA proposition be restored to the ballot, I expect that it will pass with broad popular support.”

New York Senate leadership did not respond to Fox Digital’s request for comment.