LEGALIZE IT

Illinois is now making the move to ban salvia, a naturally growing
plant that is sold as a legal, light hallucinogen. This is business
as usual for American politicians.

Marijuana is the most widely used illegal drug in America and because
of that, it has been the scourge of opportunist politicians, moral
finger-wavers and all types of other grand-standers.

The war on marijuana (yes, war on a plant, even though it can't
really fight or talk), has cost taxpayers in the country billions of
wasted dollars, prevented the development of a much needed and
promising industry, and has ruined the lives of non-violent offenders
and their families.

It is difficult to gauge the actual number of Americans who use
marijuana. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
does a good job of collecting data and comparing it with private and
government data. According to NORML, user numbers generally fall at
about 20 million, with about 11 million people using regularly.

This is an enormous segment of the U.S. population and makes
marijuana the third most used substance (behind tobacco and alcohol)
and the most used illegal substance. The demographics of this group
are not just your cast of characters from "Half Baked," old Deadheads
and the Method Man, this group is made up of mostly tax-paying,
law-abiding citizens.

Marijuana is dangerous in the sense that any mood altering chemical
is dangerous. It slows reaction time, thus making things such as
driving more dangerous.

The active ingredient in marijuana that produces these effects is a
chemical called THC. This chemical can come in amounts from 3 percent
to about 30 percent, although certain oils and hash have even higher
percentages. That can make dosage difficult especially for the novice user.

Marijuana smoke is cancerous, but not toxic; no one has ever
overdosed from marijuana. The government currently has a campaign
claiming one joint is as bad as five cigarettes. This propaganda
doesn't include the fact that cigarettes have filters, and only a
small percentage of people smoke doobies anymore, many opt for
tobacco leaves, glass pipes, bongs or vaporizers, and, with the
exception of the vaporizer (recommended for medicinal use), very
little study has been done in this area.

So the bad side of marijuana is that it is hard to dose consistently,
it slows reaction time and it is still smoke. Yet these facts still
do not qualify it by any standard of measurement to be worse than
alcohol or tobacco. Those two legal drugs each year kill more people
than marijuana could ever hope to.

Then why, in 2006, did we arrest 829,000 individuals for marijuana
offenses? Of those arrests, 89 percent were for possession - not sale
or manufacture. There are more marijuana arrests than the combined
arrests for all violent offenses in the United States. We arrest more
marijuana smokers than robbers, killers and rapists.

Where is Nancy Grace when you need her?

This is all at a whopping cost to the U.S. taxpayers of $10 billion a
year. With the crisis in funding wars of conquest, social security
and Medicare, one might want to rethink spending $10 billion
harassing people who use a plant that grows naturally.

In fact, recently some people did. Five hundred top economists,
including three Nobel Prize winners, sent a letter to President
George W. Bush saying if legalized and regulated like tobacco and
alcohol, it could produce revenues of $6.2 billion a year.

So instead of losing $10 billion, the economy could make $6.2 billion
and that money could be taxed.

This does not include the amount of revenue that a legalized,
industrial hemp industry could produce. Hemp can be used to make
paper, food, clothes and a whole slew of other things, including
fuel, and it can be grown year-round without nearly as much
environmental run-off as crops such as corn. The color of money in
America is green.

As the Method-Man once said, "Marijuana is just nature's way of
saying high." Whether it is moral, economic or practical, there is no
good argument for continued prohibition.

It is time to hold these politicians and grand-standers who waste
billions on this fruitless venture accountable, and finally do the
one thing that makes sense: Legalize it.