A FALTERING BID TO LEGALIZE MARIJUANA

The late comedian George Carlin used to explain why marijuana would
never be legalized: The pothead committee members in charge of the
legalization campaign would never be able to remember what they did
with the petition.

"Hey, man, I thought you had it," says one committee member.

"No, man, I thought you had it?" says a second member.

"Far out, man!" says a third member, staring off into space.

Actually, pothead committee members and the whereabouts of the
petition turn out not to be problem.

The petition was found and filed, and a legalization proposition has
been approved for the California ballot in the November election.

But polls show the proposition hemorrhaging support. Prospective "No"
votes are running ahead of prospective "yes" votes.

In California! The last redoubt of trendy impulses!

Analysts say the legalization proposition is faltering in significant
measure due to fuddy-duddy parents who are having second thoughts.

Letting quasi-legalization get a foot in the backdoor in the form of
"medical" marijuana, as California, New Jersey and other states have
moved to do, is one thing.

But letting it in all the way, through the front door? Parents, the
analysts say, are having their doubts about that. Even parents who
agree that the "war on drugs" is a costly boondoggle, it's said. Even
parents who have partaken of cannabis themselves and actually inhaled.

Parents are asking themselves (or so say the analysts): "Do we really
want Junior and Missy diverting their movie and pizza dollars to pot
buys and glazing themselves over with a marijuana high -- maybe while
behind the wheel of the family sedan?"

Yes, arguably, pot is less a menace to public safety than that other
legalized drug, alcohol. But do we really want to add spaced-out
tokers to the lethal mix of whoozy and/or fully inebriated motorists
already loose on the highways?

Another legalization obstacle: Those fuddy-duddy parents persist in
believing that marijuana is a gateway drug to the harder stuff, for
some, despite tendentious studies to the contrary.

And is the notion really all that nutty? Let's face it, it's hard to
picture a teenage kid initiating himself or herself into first-time
drug experimentation by assembling a spoon, a piece of rubber tubing,
a syringe and a needle and then mainlining heroin. You can bet that
such drug users did their experimentation with pot and moved on to
other stuff. (Which is not the same as saying that all pot smokers
move on to heroin.)

Other claims of legalization's wondrous public benefactions are also
encountering skeptical resistance, polling indicates

For example, advocates declare that legalized marijuana would put the
nasty drug traffickers out of business. And apart from the law
enforcement savings, revenues from a tax on legalized pot would help
upright California's capsizing, titanic public sector.

But the two claims tend to contradict each other. Illegal pot --
i.e., untaxed and therefore cheaper pot -- would undercut the market
for the state-regulated stuff. Resourceful, adaptive drug-trafficking
nasties surely would be more than equal to the competitive challenge.
So goes the thinking of many prospective "no" voters, anyway,
according to the analysts.

Some of the analysts go so far as to suggest that the California
proposition is faltering because grandiose, utopian schemes are going
out of fashion as fast as "Change You Can Believe In" has turned into
trillion-dollar annual deficits, 10 percent unemployment and the
status quo ante in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

This analysis seems to be telling us that Obama is now available to
be blamed for all things, as his predecessor once was, and
California's lagging legalization campaign is just one more item to
be added to an ever-expanding list.