PROP 19 GOES UP IN SMOKE

Instead of a celebratory puff, stoners across North America will have
to make do with a sad, sombre toke of defeat after California's
Proposition 19 failed last week. Now that everyone's mellow, stick
this in your pipe and smoke it: Prop 19 deserved to fail. It was a
shoddily constructed, flaccid attempt at marijuana
legalization.

Proposition 19 lost in the polls on November 2, with 54 per cent
voting "No," and it's hardly surprising. The legislative framework
behind Prop 19 was the flawed offspring born from a case of the
late-night munchies. One of the big problems lay in the tensions that
passing Prop 19 would create between the federal government and California.

It's all fine and dandy that you can buy your single ounce and smoke
it, but you would still be committing an illegal act, according to
federal law.

Taking on Washington over poorly conceived legislation is a pipedream,
and even within California, there would still be a quagmire of
complicated loopholes, such as taxation, which would be left up to the
discretion of individual counties. Driving more than an hour in any
direction would place you under a new jurisdiction, forcing you to
navigate a set of unnecessarily complicated guidelines.

Prop 19 sounded idyllic. You could buy your taxed weed and smoke it in
the comfort and safety of your home, smug in the knowledge that with
every toke, you were bolstering the economy. But the reality of the
situation is more tepid and murky than three-week-old bong water.

The world would be a better place if people got munchies instead of
Molotov cocktails, but it would make operating heavy machinery a
questionable enterprise. Much of the fear-mongering surrounding Prop
19 related to weed's role in the workplace, and the law's ambiguity
concerning toking at work made it easy for Prop 19's opponents to tear
it down.

California might be the home of Katy Perry's exploding cupcake bra,
but it's not the freedom-loving state we imagine it to be. It's hard
to rationalize the assumption that the state infamous for Proposition
8 would turn around and make the very liberal decision of legalizing
marijuana.

Even though Governor Arnold Schwarz-enegger played the fun-loving
robot in the Terminator franchise, it's imperative to remember that he
represents the Republican Party, however moderate he may seem.

From there, it's even more complicated to paint California uniformly
red or blue; while the state's major cities are largely Democratic,
the further east you go, the more Republican everything starts to
look. As it turns out, it might not be that the hippies were too
stoned to vote.

The issue isn't that California is taking steps towards legalizing
weed "" it's that the first attempt went up in a blaze bigger than a
lit bong on 4/20. But fear not, land of cupcake bras, there's already
talk that the 2012 elections will feature a more sophisticated
proposition where ...

I'm sorry, what was that about cupcakes?