TIME FOR MARIJUANA TO BE LEGALIZED, REGULATED

While a proposal to track medical marijuana sales is far from being
the unreasonable intrusion critics are making it out to be, the notion
certainly points out how arcane the country's anti-marijuana laws are.

An Associated Press story on Wednesday spelled out how state officials
hope to monitor who's buying medical marijuana and just how much. Some
officials say they believe that some patients are buying up large
quantities of pot and then selling it on the black market.

At this point, there's really no way of knowing that. With the
prolific number of medical marijuana dispensaries, it would be
difficult to track such sales even with a control system.

Such regulated sales aren't the beginning of some new era of Big
Brother snooping. Registry of guns and other controlled substances and
devices are long standing.

Medical patients currently can't drag a single prescription for
Vicodin from pharmacy to pharmacy, collecting huge quantities of the
narcotic for personal use or to sell on the black market. There should
be no expectation from medical marijuana users that their medicine
should be treated any differently.

But since there is no agreed upon way of how to prescribe marijuana,
it's difficult to find an easy way to control and limit its sale to
individual patients.

While video taping would do little to halt unscrupulous sales but only
allow for prosecution after the fact, it makes more sense to use some
kind of database that records the amount of medical marijuana
purchased by a cardholder.

More to the point, this and other problems medical marijuana programs
keep turning up make it clear that the age of marijuana prohibition
needs to come to an end.

Each week, this burgeoning industry and the horrific news coming out
of Mexico, where drug gangs continue to slaughter endless number of
people over illegal marijuana sales to the United States, only
highlight the obvious: it's time to legalize and regulate the substance.

The United States spends more than $40 billion a year on uselessly
trying to stop drugs from entering the country, stop people here from
using them and warehousing those that are caught with them. Meanwhile,
the illegal $400-billion-a-year industry grows each year as thousands
of people die from thug fights in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

It's a scourge unlike any other in our part of the
world.

No one is asking for the United States to stand back and allow for a
free-for-all in drug trade, but, clearly, current U.S. drug policy is
beyond dysfunctional; it's a major part of the problem.

Regulate these medicinal sales now, and then follow California's lead
toward decriminalization after that.