With this column I may burn professional bridges. I may go home for Thanksgiving break and get an NYPD-level drug test from my parents. Professors may look at me differently and my poor Yia-Yia might think that the hoop nose ring and pink hair I sport don’t just mean I wanted to marry Pete Wentz when I was 15.
Why? I think marijuana should be legalized. Nationwide.
I won’t mention whether I have smoked/will smoke/am smoking marijuana. In my opinion, whether you enjoy Mary Jane as much as Peter Parker does should not be the reason you support legalization. If you understand or appreciate freedom and democracy, you should want marijuana legalized.
First, marijuana is only a plant. Sure, it’s a plant that accompanies you while you sit on StumbleUpon for hours, chuckling at kittens playing with yarn and .gifs of people face-planting into concrete.
And sure, you could blame marijuana for your more frequent trips to Price Chopper to restock your always-dwindling shelves. And yes, there are many fragmented sentences and trailed-off thoughts floating around amongst the smokey haze that is your common area.
But it’s still just a naturally occurring plant that does not require any tampering in order to be enjoyed — I mean smoked.
Second, haven’t we already tried this whole “let’s ban something because we think it’s horrible, then realize we were being kind of harsh” thing? It was called Prohibition, and that time period in American history was like that time you slept with that lagoon creature from The Rat and want to forget so badly.
If you aren’t yet convinced that marijuana should be legalized, take a look at the White House’s petition website, We The People. The Obama administration started this site with the promise that any petition that received “enough” support would gain the White House’s attention and would be issued an official response.
As I write this, three of the top 16 petitions on We the People are “Legalize and regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol,” “legalize regulate and tax marijuana” and “stop interfering with state marijuana legalization efforts.”
The three petitions have more than 79,000 signatures on them. More than 79,000 Americans believe marijuana should be legalized, and that the federal government should not interfere with state legalization efforts. And while I totally support the idea that We the People should also focus on far more serious issues, it is apparent that the legalization of marijuana is important to many Americans.
On the other, far more conservative hand, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry wants to waste even more taxpayer dollars on the war on drugs. While campaigning in New Hampshire this week, Perry announced he wants the government to play a larger role in the war on drugs and even went so far as to say his plan “may require military in Mexico.”
Wait. Military in Mexico. The economy is in shambles, Apple has more money than our entire country and I’m going to be paying student loans until I go into menopause, but yeah, let’s spend more money on the war on drugs.
Good idea, Rick Perry.
This is the problem with criminalizing marijuana. Taxpayer dollars are wasted on kids being arrested for carrying a dime bag of weed. All the manpower that goes into “busting” a kid with marijuana costs money.
There’s paperwork, police officers, judges and jails that are involved in a marijuana-related arrest. Maybe even drug-sniffing dogs. That is a hugely unnecessary budget to catch a kid smoking a J in the Nature Preserve.
Legalize marijuana and tax it — use that money and the money you are no longer using to enforce marijuana laws to better this country. We’d have more money, more weed and hopefully fewer problems.