Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Recreational marijuana is now legal in Colorado under state law (it’s still illegal there under federal law), and those who love dancing with Mary Jane are fouling their lungs and getting sky high.
An initiative to legalize marijuana in Montana may be on the ballot in 2014, and while it might not pass this year, a similar initiative has a very high probability of passing in the next decade. Montana will then find itself in the same predicament as Colorado and Washington: regulating a drug that is legal under state law, but illegal under federal law, the supreme law of the land.
To me, this underscores the stupidity of classifying marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug; that is, a drug presumed to have no redeeming value. That classification hasn’t stopped people from growing and using the drug, but it has criminalized the drug and made criminals of the people who produce and consume it.
Criminalization has also spawned huge federal and state bureaucracies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, a huge industry for testing people for drug use, a huge rehabilitation industry, and sucked money from more important activities, such as food safety. It’s exactly what happened during Prohibition, so only a humorless zealot can keep a straight face while arguing that we didn’t know what would happen after Mary Jane was booted from the dance hall.
Criminalizing and trying to eradicate ethanol, tobacco, coca, marijuana, opium, and other substances with a long history of human use is a fool’s errand, and society knows it. Burning poppy fields and cannabis plantations is the Carrie Nation cure, and it doesn’t work (although it’s sure soul satisfying for the crusaders with the matches). Neither does rounding up delinquent young men, especially black young men, and in the southwest, Hispanics, and throwing them in the slammer for years because they had marijuana or crack or something else in their pockets. It just creates a need for more prisons, more prison guards, more drug task forces, more manufacturers of drug testing kits, more counselors, more probation officers, and higher taxes to pay for it all.
What’s left? Legalization and sensible regulation. I’m no more for legalizing Maui Gold for ten-year-olds than I’m for legalizing whiskey for 10-year-olds. There’s no reason why anyone and everyone should be able to toke-up any time, at any place, and afterward drive anywhere they want. We don’t do that with alcohol, we don’t need to do that with marijuana — and with the possible exception of a cracked and potted brains, no one is suggesting that.
Meanwhile watch the traffic in Colorado and Washington with double care. The revelers driving home from the saloon half embalmed by bourbon will be sharing the road with stoners half comatose after sucking smoke from joints filled with righteous s---, and both will be sharing the road with us while in no condition to know they’re not alone.