Britain Legalizes Pot…

…world crashes into sun. Mark Morford of the SF Gate announced in Britain Gets Quietly Stoned… that Britain has indeed joined most of the rest of Europe in that they will no longer “waste all that time and all those resources and moneys on busting casual potheads for no reason”. Of course, his immediate take on it is that it just points up the increasingly puritan, wrongheaded drug policies of the U.S.

The U.S. drug war has more and more the markings of something that the administration is just too pigheaded to admit is the wrong way to address the problem of drug abuse. It’s not that there isn’t a problem, it’s that the drug war makes the problem worse while letting all the right people profit from it (even though some of the wrong people do too, and even though a lot of innocent people get hurt, more hurt than they would if we spent all of that money on treatment and prevention instead of weapons and terrorist attacks on other nations). It’s that we shouldn’t be buying this hideous lie from the administration that “this is the only way to combat the drug problem effectively; to make your neighborhoods safe. You want to be safe, don’t you? I thought so. Just shut up and let us do our jobs. Who do you think you are to question your government?”

“The U.K. is not, by the way, claiming drugs are safe. They aren’t saying drugs can’t be dangerous if abused. They are simply acknowledging that casual pot use is of such minor import and of such negligible threat to the social fabric, punishing people for its use is about as successful as trying to discourage a Mormon from masturbating.”

You see, there’s a middle ground. You don’t have to admit pot is the answer to everything, as those annoying pot evangelists will try to convince you, just that killing and incarcerating people (opening them up, pardon the phrase, to the hideous punishments found in the U.S. penal system, again, pardon the pun) doesn’t solve anything, it just makes it worse and alienates the people you’re claiming to be helping (though the proponents of the drug war can really only claim to be helping and they do that only because they know it sells their program; whether they care about what happens to most of the American population is not likely, seeing as how most of the people affected by the drug war are not white or rich. That’s not to say that people doing drugs aren’t white and rich; they just don’t get punished for it.)

“From RU-486 to MDMA to marijuana, we [in the U.S.] remain constantly embarrassed … on the international stage… Oh you Americans. So cute and hypocritical and two-faced, the highest rate of casual drug use in the world and the most highly sexualized pop culture … [and] … some poor teenage kid still going to jail for a decade for a first pot offense in Utah while Dad gets drunk again and beats his wife … Going so far as to equate, on national television, casual drug use with supporting terrorism. Thanks Geedubya. Nice way to alienate the culture even further, insult the intelligence of an entire nation.”

Not to mention an entire world. Where are the people who really believe this stuff? Are there actually people who watch those commercials and nod sagely, if a bit sadly, to themselves that, indeed, yes, those kids are responsible for killing those people…because they do drugs. Or is it more likely that there are a lot of people who just don’t think about it, who just aren’t offended enough at this smoke their government, using their tax dollars (3 million just for the 2 Super Bowl spots), is blowing up their asses?

“After all, which would you rather have, 28 million Americans casually smoking a joint now and then to relax and de-stress and be able to watch the news without screaming and hurling sharp objects at Connie Chung’s bizarrely shellacked head, or those same 28 million addicted to hardcore synthetic chemicals in Prozac and Xanax and Zoloft, with creepy polymerized smiles and a slight twitchy spasm in the left eye? You make the call.”