WHEN WILL WE LEARN TO LEGALIZE?

I'm no economist, but I know in order for a product to sell, there
has to be a market for it.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also knows this, which is why she
said Wednesday, "[The U.S.'s] insatiable demand for illegal drugs
fuels the drug trade."

Well hot damn. This shouldn't be news to anyone. We're a nation of
stark-raving mad drug fiends. Whether legal or not, Americans, like
anyone else, enjoy the escape and relaxation their normal,
anxiety-laden lives don't naturally have.

That's why we have a Starbucks or Caribou Coffee on every street
corner in America; we need the fix.

Cigarette laws take away the personal accountability we once had,
turning us now into whiny, thumb-sucking babies. But you can still
smoke and get cancer and there is no violence over beating weeds.

America loves alcohol as much as any other nation; in 2007, we drank
enough for every person in the country to guzzle seven bottles of
liquor, 12 bottles of wine and 230 cans of beer. That's a lot, even
considering that one third of the population doesn't drink.

All of these things are drugs, the most used and abused of our great
nation. But can you imagine if they were illegal? Prohibition of
caffeine; a coffee bean war with the Colombians. A nation of
addicted smokers chucking grenades in the streets over a pack
of Newports? Can you imagine what banning these substances would do
to the remaining thread holding our economy up?

And could you imagine something as wild as the prohibition of
alcohol? Good God, the madness.

But wait - didn't that already happen? From 1919 to 1933, the U.S.
had a different war on drugs. Instead of battling Mexican drug
cartels attempting to satisfy their loyal customers with the
relaxing effects of marijuana, we were doing the same thing to
gangsters and rumrunners trying to satisfy the country with booze.

Any idea what happened there? The late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson said
in a 1997 interview about the legalization of drugs: "Look at
Prohibition: all it did was make a lot of criminals rich."

That it did. And it also resulted in a whole lot of gunfire, murder
and definitely didn't help the slumping economy of the times.

And look where we're at today. A third of the country doesn't drink.

How does this not make sense? Marijuana is illegal because it has
been grandfathered down as a bad thing. Well guess what, it's
medicine in 13 states.

Now Washington is planning on upping border security with a $184
billion program to take and destroy billions of dollars in potential
product. Along with drugs, they hope to get a hold of the
military-style weaponry the drug cartels are using - but they
wouldn't be stealing those, they'd be taking back what was theirs,
since 90 percent of the weapons and equipment come from the U.S.

New flash, kids. You won't have a problem with guns, drugs or the
economy if you legalized marijuana.

Instead of spending billions on prosecuting, protecting, fighting,
incarcerating and burying bodies every year, why not make billions by
selling it?