WITH BILLIONS WASTED, WAR ON WEED IS POUND FOOLISH

We're changing our minds about tobacco and marijuana.

This week a Boston jury found it so disgusting that tobacco company
Lorillard pushed free cigarettes on a 9-year-old in a poor
neighborhood, they awarded crazy money to the estate of the now-dead
Marie Evans. Jurors blamed Lorillard for hooking her as a child even
though she died at 54 of lung cancer decades after everybody found
out that smoking kills.

This week we also learned that more high school seniors are smoking
marijuana than cigarettes and that high schoolers viewed weed more
favorably than tobacco.

Asked what they'd view as worse -- their teens smoking pot or
Marlboros -- the majority of parents who spoke with or e-mailed me at
96.9 FM said, given a choice, they'd take the pot.

Why? Let's call it "the jig is up" argument.

Many of these parents smoked pot. Some admitted they still do.
Nonetheless, they claimed to be responsible taxpayers, business
owners or employees who scoff at the brain-dead stoner stereotype.
How many smokers can smoke just a cigarette or two a week? Yet
recreational marijuana smokers get "high" on just three or four hits.

Typical was a 42-year-old I'll call "John," a government worker who
said his own 68-year-old father, a contractor, still smokes pot
watching sports on TV. John himself smoked pot in college but quit
once his children reached school.

"There was no place to smoke," he said. He wouldn't in front of his
kids, in the car, backyard or basement. Then work started drug
testing. "I can't lose my job," he said. "Do I think it's worse than
drinking or cigarettes? No. I know people who've died from drinking
and emphysema. I never even heard of anybody dying from weed."

Those inclined to support marijuana's continued prohibition were
those who'd seen drug abuse up close. Tobacco may kill you, they say.
But it won't alter your behavior, argued a woman whose sister moved
up to heroin and couldn't "handle" the pot.

That makes no sense: Most handle it fine. But equally senseless is
law enforcement's line, just repeated in a Herald story about
increased violence in marijuana trafficking since Massachusetts voted
2 to 1 in 2008 to decriminalize less than an ounce.

District attorneys Gerard Leone, Dan Conley and John Blodgett never
addressed the obvious: If we could buy marijuana at 7/ 11 -- and tax
it like mad -- that ends the pot black market and crime.

It's time we stop wasting billions on the pot war, which will never
be won, and which, along the way, makes criminals of good Americans.