What if the headline in the State Journal Friday had read “Big beer brewing operation busted; 2 men charged”…instead of “Big marijuana growing operation busted; 2 men charged.” Such a headline might have been possible during the prohibition era, another failed “great experiment” in forcing the beliefs and morals of a tiny minority on the majority.
It’s still news when the cops bust a dope-growing operation, particularly one of pretty good size, being run out of a home in a residential neighborhood. (Clue: the electric power bill for the home was $913 a month.) Cops seized 628 marijuana plants, each, they said, capable of producing a pound of pot apiece with a street value of 1 to 3 thousand bucks.
As Mel Gibson’s character Dale McCussic said in the movie “Tequila Sunrise”: what street is THAT?
Or, as one of the local TV stations reported, each plant producing about a pound of pot, with a street value of 1 to 3 million dollars. Easy mistake to make, but if a pound of pot could bring a million bucks, there’d be a lot more billionaires in this world.
We struggle in Cheesetopia to decide whether we should legalize “medicinal” marijuana. The cops keep yammering at us that it’s a highly addictive and extremely dangerous gateway drug, which leads to heroin addiction and death; that even allowing a wedge in the door by legalizing pot for medicine would inevitably result in greater availability of the illicit weed.
As the cops know all too well, marijuana is already easily available.
So why do we still play these games? For one thing, because people lie when being surveyed. “Are you in favor of legalizing marijuana?” “Oh, heavens no.” And then the cops and politicians trot out these “surveys” to support their position.
Perhaps the “oh, heavens no” people “experimented” with marijuana in their late teens or early 20’s. Perhaps they share a joint at a party once every few months. Perhaps, as a few choice politicians have said, they never inhaled.
Hypocrites.
The narcs are not happy about the growing medical use of marijuana because that could push pot off the Schedule 1 list. Sched-1 is supposedly the worst stuff, with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical value. Here's the list: http://bit.ly/dCdb1w
ReplyDeleteCurrently cannabis is incarcerated on the max-security Sched-1 with such hard-core villains as heroin and the dreaded Pholcodine - an over-the-counter cough medicine legal just about everywhere but in the good ol' U.S.A.
Accepted medical value? There's the rub. The feds can't put cocaine on the Sched-1 because it has accepted medical uses. They don't want any weisenheimer medical types screwing up the list any worse, so even medical study of the effects of tetrahydrocannabinol - the active ingredient of the evil ganja - is strictly forbidden. Talk about a Catch-22. It's no wonder we have never been able to sort this stuff out in a sensible way.