New York State may soon embrace medical marijuana. We’d be better
off if the government legalized it outright. Why talk half-steps when other
states have already made cannabis legal?
It was Tommy Chong who put it to New York via social media, saying
that we were behind the high times. New York used to be the place that this
kind of progress was launched, Chong mourned, now we’re catching up with Colorado and Washington.
Tommy Chong is right. Marijuana
should be legal in all 50 states. It’s ludicrous that people are in jail for
growing it or smoking it or having a big wad of it rolled into a cigar leaf or
in a brownie or anal suppository or however else people are getting it into
their bodies today. Legalize it.
The people have spoken. In times
that it’s been put to a vote, voters support legalization of marijuana. Whether
it’s medical marijuana, which is more widespread, or the outright legalization
that we’ve seen recently in Washington and Colorado. But beyond that, even in
places that still enforce draconian laws against the weed, marijuana use is
very high (pun intended).
We are not far from the prohibition
of marijuana being as antiquated and ridiculous as the prohibition against alcohol that
started almost 100 years ago. That prohibition is rightfully considered a joke
today, and our grandchildren will look down their noses at the outlawing of
marijuana in the 20th Century. Rightly so.
So let us join our voices to the
millions that already call for legalizing electric lettuce in New York. Let the
City lead the way and hopefully the state will follow. Let the fifty states tax and regulate cannabis like
they do tobacco and alcohol. The government can’t stop people from smoking it,
so it might as well make a few bucks to help keep the roads paved.
But where there is support for
legalization, let’s also support some healthy distrust of the marijuana
industry. Wanting to legalize it shouldn’t stop us from criticizing it.
Marijuana does not belong on a list of outlawed substances (if any do is
another matter), but that doesn’t mean it belongs in our bodies.
There is a lot of awareness and
opposition to genetically modified foods and the
potential dangers they pose to people’s health. There’s a greater demand now
for natural and organic foods made free from the use of dangerous chemicals or
genetic manipulation. Yet none of this scrutiny is being applied to marijuana
cultivation.
If you’re not willing to eat a
plant that was grown with a genetically modified seed, then don’t smoke something
that’s named for a Star Trek character. I’ll do what I can to avoid
food made possible by Monsanto, but I’m also not going to smoke something named
“Vulcan Mind Meld No. 6.” Do we really need to be a lazier, slower-witted
country that eats even more junk food at two o’clock in the morning?
Let’s definitely legalize the
chronic, but let’s also approach it with the same skepticism as we would any other
element of big agribusiness. And that’s what marijuana is: big business. No one
is selling weed out the kindness of their heart. Tobacco and alcohol companies
are rightly treated with suspicion. The people hawking ganja are no more
saintly.
Medical marijuana is great, but the
overwhelming majority of people using weed are using it to get high for its own
sake. They have every right to do that. But unless you have a serious medical
condition, marijuana isn’t good for you. I want to live
in a world where people are not persecuted for smoking a plant. But I also know
that the world does not need more pot heads.
Let’s increase the sanity of the
conversation. Marijuana legalization is the right thing to do. But let us
embrace legalization of marijuana without having to embrace marijuana itself.
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