LEGALIZED MARIJUANA MAY BE ON THE WAY

In 1939, when I was in fourth grade, I would bring a half-pint whiskey
bottle to school filled with chocolate milk to have with my lunch. My
teacher, a ministerial student in our parochial school, showed me the
liquor tax tag and told me it was against the law to reuse the bottle.
My dad reassured me that the teacher was wrong because there was no
alcohol in the bottle.

However, seven years earlier, even having whiskey in that bottle was
illegal. But in 1933, the prohibition experiment ended and alcohol was
decriminalized. And now it seems that it may be time to decriminalized
marijuana.

Medical use of marijuana has already been accepted in California.
Conservative guru William F. Buckley Jr. was in favor of its
decriminalization. U.S. Sen. Jim Webb of conservative Virginia has
proposed a bipartisan commission on criminal justice reform to
consider ending the war on drugs to alleviate the crowed conditions in
our prisons. That would include decriminalizing marijuana.

So maybe by the 2030s there will be marijuana packages on the shelf
with tax tags similar to the tax tag on my whiskey bottle filled with
chocolate milk in the 1930s.

Ray Hollmann

Fairview Heights