As I said before, if you don’t like herb, or ganja, or Maryjane, or pot, then don’t buy it, smoke it, or bake it into your Christmas cookies (although Santa would like THAT, ho, ho, ho!).

Likewise, if you don’t want your kids doing it, then don’t let them buy it (and good luck with that, just as good luck keeping them away from a 40 oz can of Mickey’s Malt Liquor or a pack of Camel Lights…)

All of the rest of your argument is just more socio-mumbo-jumbo that Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley (just to name a few) rejected LONG ago, since they knew that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or nicotine (don’t even dare to have be recite the evidence on THAT!), and if caffeine were to be introduced today, it would probably be listed as a Schedule III drug, just like alcohol and nicotine would be, if they were introduced today…

Oh, by the way, those three (booze, cigs, and java) are DRUGS, just like the satanical “marijuana”! Perhaps you forgot…

You must have some kind of hate toward those of your college classmates who were lighting up when you weren’t…or maybe you ACTUALLY believed that everything depicted in “Reefer Madness” was true! Oh, the horror!

Would you please stop making sense?

Irrational emotional rants are so much more fun to read.

Yeah, I know they don’t (do herb in Okieland) — and it shows!

How enlightened and successful they have become as a result of their puritanism!

If it weren’t for the oil beneath their feet, think where they would be now as an economic presence in the US!

I left off one:

6) I don’t HAVE to take over an entire state (or national) forest to “grow” my Beefeater’s gin — that’s what my local BevMo is for; I go in, pick up a bottle, pay for it, go home, and drink it with some tonic in the privacy of my own home, and I don’t try to stop you from drinking your rum and Coke in the privacy of your own home just because I don’t like rum…

Really? Legalization won’t get rid of the organized crime element prevalent in today’s marijuana trade?

1) I want what YOU’RE smokin’ — that $#!+ is GOOOOOOD!

2) (Re)legalizing alcohol did away with scenes like this in major American cities, almost overnight.

3) (Partially) legalizing marijuana in cities like Oakland and LA have reeked uncontrollable havoc in the urban areas, with massive riots, endless waves of mass murders…oh, wait, they haven’t — since people peacefully go into “pot doc shops” and get their herb, pay for it, and go home and smoke it.

4) If you don’t like smokin’ weed — then don’t — same argument as there is about abortion (if you don’t like it, don’t have one — but don’t stop other people from exercising their rights over their own bodies in a free country; just add taxes if the end effect of select behavior will add a financial burden to the greater society)

5) If you think there is NO violence occuring as a result of our inane national laws against herb, ask the poor folks down in Mexico how they feel about the Zetas and their rivals in the illegal cultivation industry chopping each other’s heads off over the stuff that gets exported up here…oh wait, that’s not happening in our bright and shiny “suburbia on the hill”, so we don’t HAVE to care, do we?

It’s a new age, John. Nobody smokes that **** to get high anymore. It’s all medicine now.

Why put up with the mess –

just go to the best!

Better yet, let’s just decriminalize it and put the money flushed down the rat hole on arrests, etc., as well as the revenue gathered through taxation of it as a legally produced (albeit controlled) product (just like alcohol and tabacco) toward better things like K-12 education, etc.

Let’s move forward, people…