MARY JANE MONDAY

From AlterNet, an article that both tracks the legalization movement's steady political gains throughout the country, and takes an in depth look at the weird situation in Oakland, California:

The Next Front in the Marijuana Battle

While the battle to allow marijuana for medical use is still being fought across the nation, the forward edge of the war for acceptance is pushing further: towards ending prohibition altogether. Campaigns to regulate rather than prohibit marijuana are catching fire around the country. The residents of Oakland, California – which already has legal medical marijuana dispensaries, will soon vote on whether to permit marijuana sales to all adults as a way to eliminate street dealing and fund city services.

On June 29, county officials qualified the Oakland Cannabis Initiative for the November election. Supporters of the initiative had turned in over 32,000 signatures. "It would require the City of Oakland to develop a system to tax and regulate adult sale and use of marijuana as soon as possible under state law," says Joe DeVries, a board member of the Oakland Civil Liberties Alliance, which supported the measure. "And until state law makes it possible, it requires that the Oakland police treat adult use and sale of marijuana as the lowest policing priority."

The Oakland Cannabis Initiative is one of several similar measures intended to show local support for statewide marijuana law reform legislation.

Far out, man.

Click here for the rest.

I do not advocate marijuana use. Smoking it presents all the dangers associated with smoking tobacco. As with alcohol, driving while high is quite dangerous, and chronic use also seems to sap motivation and cause laziness. However, I don't particularly oppose marijuana use either. You'll note that, even though pot is comparable to alcohol and tobacco in its harms, booze and cigs are very, very legal. Quite obviously, the reasons for ganja's prohibition status have much more to do with American political and cultural history (and, I might add, the big bucks that are made in the massive anti-drug industry) than they do with health, public safety, or morality. We're spending billions of dollars and ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens who are continuously swept up in the criminal justice system in order to keep the dastardly devil-weed illegal.

It's really a no-brainer: America should legalize marijuana right now. It's so simple, even a half-way intelligent conservative ought to realize it, and one, in fact, does.

From the Houston Chronicle, my favorite conservative, founder of the National Review, and converter of Ronald Reagan to the right wing, William F. Buckley Jr., on why pot should go above ground:

Penalties for marijuana use hard to defend

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.

The laws concerning marijuana aren't exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating.

General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or -- exulting in life in the paradigm -- committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?

Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening in the matter of marijuana. 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. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10 billion to $15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone.

Whoa, dude...wow.

Click here for the rest.

Sometimes I wonder if Buckley inhaled back in his college days; conservative as he is, he's much more cool than Bill Clinton ever was. Hmmm.

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