STOP THE HATCHET JOB ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA SHOPS

Around the turn of the last century, Carrie Nation opposed alcohol
use. So zealous was her crusade that she gained a reputation for
barging into bars armed with her Bible and a hatchet to smash up the
establishments. Some say she even excused the assassination of
President William McKinley, as he allegedly drank alcohol.

Today's prohibitionists, too civilized for direct physical force,
instead seek to impose the force of the vote. Rather than send in a
woman with a hatchet, they threaten to send in police armed with guns.

Grand Junction voters already banned medical marijuana dispensaries.
Apparently, they want to punish people with debilitating pain and nausea
by making their medicine harder to obtain. (Disclosure: One of our
relatives uses a medical marijuana card.)

The modern Carrie Nations now want to legally destroy the lonely
medical marijuana shop in Palisade. But does this make any sense?

To vote for such a ban, you must believe that mob rule properly trumps
rights of property, economic production, and voluntary exchange. Once
the mob gains the sanction of the government and the use of its guns,
it can be difficult to contain. Who will become the next victim, and
on what pretext? Should the mob also be empowered to shut down gun
stores or politically incorrect bookstores?

Another victim of Carrie's hatchet is individual responsibility. Most
early Americans placed the responsibility of overindulgence on the
user. For example, they condemned drunkenness as an abuse of a
God-given gift. But alcohol was no more to blame for being drunk than
food was responsible for being fat or guns for being careless. While
God made no bad drink, people tended to think, some people made bad
choices.

Today many count medical marijuana as a God-given gift. We wonder
whether Carrie Nation would gleefully applaud or recoil in horror to
witness her modern intellectual heirs. Today, rather than blame
individuals for obesity, many blame the clown Ronald McDonald,
promotional toys, and supersized portions. Who needs parental
responsibility? Far easier to blame inanimate objects.

Modern-day Carrie Nations have taken the hatchet to all of Mexico,
where the United States' prohibitionist policies have decimated the
country by enriching violent and well-armed narcoterrorists. Tea Party
favorites such as Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Tom Tancredo have
suggested scaling back the drug war as a way to curtail that violence.

That prohibition causes crime waves and police corruption should come
as no surprise. Alcohol Prohibition enriched violent gangsters like Al
Capone and Bugs Moran. Today, we don't know brewers of alcoholic
beverages as violent gangsters with names like "Johnny the Hick," we
know them as respectable citizens with names like "Governor John
Hickenlooper." Yes, alcohol is a drug, so we elected a one-time drug
dealer to lead our state.

We wonder whether Carrie Nation would have been proud that her
prohibitionist legacy included the government intentionally poisoning
people. Last year Deborah Blum wrote an article for Slate titled, "The
Chemist's War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned
alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences."

Blum writes, "Frustrated that people continued to consume so much
alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try
a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of
industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products
regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The
idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by
the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by
some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people."

Collateral damage, right? Just like the sick in the Grand Valley who no
longer have access to their medicine. Blum quotes a 1927 editorial from
the Chicago Tribune: "Normally, no American government would engage in
such business... It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition
that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified."

By the logic of prohibition, the ends justify the means, and
individuals and their rights become expendable. At least medical
marijuana is available now in Colorado -- though the state recently
saddled the industry with onerous rules and regulatory incompetence.
We seem to be lurching in the right direction.

We are also heartened that Rep. Jared Polis from Boulder has signed on
to a bill to help return marijuana policy to the states. Polis joins
other Democrats as well as Republicans Ron Paul and Dana
Rohrabacher.

Polis stated in a release, "When a small business, such as a medical
marijuana dispensary, can't access basic banking services [because of
federal laws] they either have to become cash-only -- and become
targets of crime -- or they'll end up out of business."

Frankly, people of the Grand Valley should be embarrassed to let
Boulder take the lead on such an important issue of property rights
and individual liberty.