Smokey Dare:

MAYBE IT'S TIME TO REGULATE MARIJUANA LIKE CIGARETTES

Smoke 'em if you got 'em: Craig Johnson, executive director of
ProtectYouth.org, a Dallas-based nonprofit and lobbying group,
doesn't smoke marijuana himself, he says. He doesn't think your kids
should be smoking it either. No drug dealings in the neighborhood;
none in the schoolyard either. But he and his group have a thought
about how to protect children from the demon weed: legalize, regulate
and tax the marijuana market, the way we do tobacco.

OK, so what? Lots of people think the same thing. But not many
supporters of regulated marijuana have undertaken the work completed
recently by Johnson's 3-year-old group, which has spent the past year
or so compiling reams of government and law enforcement data to
support a fairly straightforward, reasonable case: Since 1997, when
the government started cracking down on cigarette retailers who sell
to minors, the percentage of high school students who smoke
cigarettes has dropped dramatically, while the percentage of kids who
smoke grass has held pretty steady. In fact, in Dallas ISD, the
percentage of kids who admitted "current" marijuana use in surveys by
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outstripped tobacco
smokers around 2000, and today the potheads lead the nicotine fiends
by more than 5 percentage points.

The gist of the catchy-titled Tobacco and Marijuana Market Impact
Index Volume I: Texas Trends, which is available online, is this: In
1996, 56 percent of Texas retailers who sold tobacco reported they
sold to minors. Thanks to stricter enforcement since then, that
number has fallen to 11.3 percent. In the meantime, despite thousands
of arrests for marijuana possession among youths, the typical price
of marijuana has fallen or held steady and kids are still toking away.

"We're more able to efficiently regulate the tobacco market than the
marijuana market," Johnson tells Buzz, so why not adapt some of the
same regulation to both weeds? Effective regulation beats our current
system of ineffective criminalization any day.

Like we said, it's a straightforward, reasonable argument for a
change that could have beneficial affects on government budgets, not
to mention kids. So, of course, Buzz figures it's all just pissing in
the wind (see: health care reform). Johnson, though, is a little more
sanguine. Demographics are changing, old people are giving up seats
of power and a younger, more reform-minded generation (you know,
stoners) is taking the reins.

So there's hope. All we need is for some more old people to die off.
Hmm, say, here's a thought. Suppose we create these government-funded
death panels...