LEGALIZING POT WILL HELP SAVE PATIENTS, CALIFORNIA'S ECONOMY

From week to week, there are five basic topics that a columnist
covers. In ascending order of importance they are sports, pop culture
and the arts, local politics, national politics, and predictions.
Depending on the reader, there is some debate about whether local or
national politics is number two, but there is no question that the
most important skill any good columnist possesses is the ability to
accurately forecast the future.

Naturally, my 14-months-before-anyone-else 2007 Official
Groundbreaking Prediction that Barack Obama would be elected the 44th
president of the United States followed by my alone-among-my-peers
2008 Official Groundbreaking Prediction that the Obama inauguration
would be the "cultural, social, and political event of a generation;
like Woodstock meets the March on Washington" cemented my status as
America's smartest columnist.

My Official Groundbreaking Prediction of 2010, encompassing all five
of the columnist's main topics, is that the voters in the state of
California will once again lead the nation by making lawful the
personal possession, processing, sharing, or transporting of not more
than one ounce of cannabis -- as well as cultivation, processing,
distribution, the safe and secure transportation, sale and possession
for sale of cannabis. In other words, Californians are finally going
to legalize it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I first became interested in
cannabis before I really knew what it was. The late, great John
Hughes made a movie called "The Breakfast Club" in which a bunch of
high school kids from different cliques stuck in an all-day Saturday
detention together become friends after they smoke a few joints and
let their guard down. As an eighth grader I remember thinking that
anything that could bring jocks, metal-heads, freaks, geeks, and
princesses together must be magic.

As I got older I got educated and I learned that it's not magic, it's
medicine. That isn't to say that cannabis isn't abused as a
recreational drug or that we should encourage its use by young
people, but the fact remains that the Food & Drug Administration has
approved it to treat nausea, vomiting, anorexia, and wasting. If a
breast cancer patient wants to use cannabis to stimulate her appetite
and help her keep food down so she doesn't waste away, Californians
(when given the chance) aren't going to tell her she can't smoke a
joint in the privacy of her own home because somebody somewhere might
use cannabis just to get high. This November, voters will ignore the
tired, old arguments about what message legalization sends to kids --
at least until we talk about binge drinking in movies -- and try to
understand that the best message we can send is the truth: that
cannabis helps sick patients get well. It will also be argued that
the decriminalization measure will open the door to scientific
research (and the accompanying grants) that can't be done in any
other state. And it will pass.

Speaking of sick patients, the California economy -- the eighth
largest in the world -- could also stand to get better. Right now we
waste untold millions of dollars arresting, prosecuting, and
incarcerating non-violent cannabis crimes; with four out of five
being simple possession charges and one in five being a kid under 18.
Proponents will successfully argue that decriminalizing cannabis
would save us that money, spare us the opportunity costs of taking a
law enforcement officer away from the investigation/prevention of
real crime, and have the added benefit of saving hundreds of
thousands of our fellow Californians from wearing the mark of the
convicted criminal for the rest of their lives.

The most persuasive argument is going to be the economic benefit of
cannabis tourism. When the hypocritical moral dispute is rightly
tossed aside (since nobody can logically say that cannabis is more
dangerous to society than alcohol), then we are left with the
geographic reality of the Golden State -- which is that in addition
to southern California's wine country, the lush Central Valley, and
northern California's wine country, we have the Emerald Triangle:
Trinity, Mendocino, and Humboldt counties. Throughout the world,
these places are as synonymous with premium cannabis as Sonoma and
Napa are with fine wine. Cannabis is already a $40-plus billion per
year industry, the legalization of which could lead to an additional
$1.5 billion in tax revenue for California -- and that's before
tourists from the 13 other states where it's legal for patients start arriving.

Back in March, Debra Bowen, California's secretary of state,
certified that the question would be on the ballot for the Nov. 2
general election after a random sampling verified that the required
433,971 valid signatures had been submitted. For the record, the
actual number of qualifying signatures counted was over 694,000 when
the tallying stopped -- indicating broad support among voters and a
smooth road to passage.

When California voters see past the inevitable ridiculous arguments
in support of the same policies that incarcerate our people, hurt our
economy, and prevent scientific breakthroughs that could help
terminally ill patients, we will literally grow our way out of this
recession -- one cannabis plant at a time.