Who's Crazy Now?

"Stiff competition from thousands of America's mom-and-pop marijuana farmers threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law-enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico."

That's the lead paragraph in a recent article about the failure of the law enforcement approach to drug regulation.

Let's be perfectly clear- putting the police in charge made things worse, exactly as predicted by every major study over the course of a century. They have made things incalculably worse, costing the US economy at least $3-$4 trillion as they became cruel and corrupt in the pursuit of their prey- enough to have built every mile of limited access highway in the entire nation.

And all that needed to happen to put us on the right track was to protect a small, but unusually energetic, portion of the population from the predations of the police. So much for the media image of the spaced-out stoner- it seems these "laid back" dopers have accomplished in a few years a goal that has eluded the massed efforts of all of the police forces of North America for half a century.

Could America's pot smokers have a little respect now? Probably not, in a nation whose main commerce is the marketing of artificial distinction. You can't turn the ship on a dime, but at least now the shining beacon can be clearly seen. Having predicted this outcome 42 years ago, I do not stand corrected. And it feels damn good.