Dear Friend and Reader:
I had my first near brush with breaking the law when my mother forced me to flush my bag of shake-weed she found rifling through my luggage while I was home from schoolВ for Christmas break. Regardless of whether police were present or not, marijuana laws and taboosВ against it were present enough inВ my day that myВ mother, a new immigrant, not at all enamoured of American culture, let alone its counter-cultureВ decided to keep her daughter from facing time in the slammer in Santa Cruz County, forcing me to discard my weed in the circling toilet drain.
Such were the days of growing up in the 60s and 70s in Puritan-founded America with Catholic parents. So powerful was the message against the use of marijuana that it was made an emblem of criminal social decline. Its very presence made you suspect. Fast-forward thirty years later, guided by behavior that kept all manner of subversive smoking under wraps, it was a revelationВ for me to read my favorite local political columnist in the SF Chronicle, Carla Marinucci writing about the growing movement to legalize marijuana, and from surprising quarters of support.
Leading conservatives like former Secretary of State George Shultz and the late economist Milton Friedman years ago called for legalization and a change in the strategy in the war on drugs. This year mainstream pundits like Fox News’ Glenn Beck and CNN’s Jack Cafferty have publicly questioned the billions spent each year fighting the endless war against drugs and to suggest it now makes more financial and social sense to tax and regulate marijuana.
“It’s a combination of all these things coming together at once and producing that ‘aha’ moment,” said Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, who for years has monitored the wavering political winds on the subject. He says so much has changed in recent months that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, it looks possible.”
“If you’d asked me 10 years ago – or three years ago – I would have said it will be a long, slow slog,” he said. “And now, it looks like it might happen faster than any of us believed.”
It was bound to come. We were just indoors for too long to realize the day was breaking. The economy and just plain common sense are starting to weigh in on our decisions. Marijuana is a lucrative cash crop that could bring in revenue to states suffering underВ the largerВ recession affecting the entire country.В The cost of incarceration for petty crimes like pot possession weigh down law enforcement from the streets to the prisons, and the taxpayers are footing the bill for each inmateВ at a whopping (for my state) $65k per capita per year.