So I was making dinner, and on NPR I hear, to my amazement, a report by Robert Siegel and Michele Norris marking April 20 as Marijuana Observance Day. “We’re hearing more talk about legalizing marijuana,” noted Norris, “and not just from those who are lighting up.”
I, myself, lit up —metaphorically—over this. Aside from the fact that this is a policy change that’s at least 30 years overdue, the story aired at the same time we were cringing over the long-suspected yet nonetheless horrific accounts of torture under the Bush regime. Once again, the right wing of the Republican Party comes off as addicted to all forms of cruelty, just as it did when it sanctioned “extreme rendition.” But maybe if right-wing Republicans all smoked a little pot—the gateway drug to mellowness—the world would be a better place. Just a thought.
As many critics and commentators—and not just on the left—have noted, repeatedly, the so-called “War on Drugs” is one of the single most ineffectual, expensive, dangerous, dumb-ass activities our government engages in, especially the part focused on marijuana. Let’s hear that radical socialist William F. Buckley on the subject in 2004, in what he calls an “exercise in scrupulosity”: “There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of these—87 percent—involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana…Professor Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance…estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.”
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