MARIJUANA: NOT JUST FOR GLAUCOMA, ALSO FOR GETTING HIGH

Imagine an America where consuming alcohol was against the law.

There would be no backyard barbecues, no cocktail parties, no clubs, no
frat parties, no Homer Simpson.

Millions of Americans would break the law by grabbing a beer with a buddy.
Millions more would risk arrest for wining and dining a date.

Of course, several illegal liquor rings would emerge, powered by basement
brewers and talking black bears smuggling Labatt Blue across the border.

Politicians, interested in winning votes, would appropriate millions of
tax-payer dollars to an anti-alcohol campaign that would prove as
ineffective and wasteful as every government initiative.

State and local governments would waste even more money prosecuting the
millions of otherwise law-abiding and responsible citizens who just wanted
a stiff drink.

Sound familiar? It should. This America existed in the 1920s, when
moralists controlled the government and tried to limit freedom under the
guise of positive social reform.

Prohibition advocates claimed their "noble experiment" would reduce crime,
reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses and improve health
and hygiene. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a
miserable failure on all counts.

All prohibition did was prove that eliminating mutually beneficial exchange
never works. James Diffee is editor of The Auburn Plainsman. You can reach
him at 844-9021.

Try telling that to the generals of our nation's noble drug war, an effort
that sucks millions of dollars from taxpayers and does absolutely nothing
to hinder drug use.

Recently, more states are passing laws that allow the freedom to smoke
marijuana for medicinal use (Massachusetts just last week), and the
legislators of those states should be applauded; but medicinal marijuana is
a far cry from the freedom any of-age American should have.

I am not advocating the legalization of every narcotic; I do not believe
crack should be unionized. What I do believe is that marijuana, less
physically harmful than cigarettes and non-addictive, should be the choice
of citizens 21 years or older.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, from the beginning of
1990 through 1994, 2,153,700 deaths have resulted from smoking cigarettes.

The CDC said that cigarettes remain "the leading preventable cause of death
in the United States."

Statistics for the States' other drug of choice, alcohol, aren't much
better. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism, more than 100,000 people die of alcohol-related deaths each
year. Many of these deaths are violent, and often take the lives of the
innocent as well as the intoxicated.

Not to mention the more than 32,000 Americans that die each year in
hospitals due to mistreatment with widely used, legal drugs.

Now, marijuana prohibitors, how many deaths are the direct result of
marijuana ingestion? Not one.

Obviously the argument that preventing responsible people from smoking pot
somehow protects the citizenry is made invalid by laws that allow more
dangerous drugs.

Another thing to consider is the financial burden arresting marijuana
"criminals" places on state and city governments, and the amount of money
that could be raised if the same taxes placed on cigarettes and booze were
placed on weed.

Federal, state and local governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars
arresting, convicting and imprisoning citizens for marijuana use.

That is hundreds of millions of dollars that could be spent on a variety of
other, bankrupt programs. Some states spend almost as much money
prosecuting drug offenders as they do educating children.

And weed is a cash crop. If marijuana was privatized by corporations and
taxed by the federal government, millions and millions more would be
brought in.

Not to mention all the money that will be taken from terrorists.

Morality has no place in the argument, because the government of the United
States has no business legislating morality. I'm not going to bother
arguing against moralist objections.

In 2002 TIME magazine estimated that 12 million American's smoke marijuana
regularly, and another 80 million have experimented with it.

Ultimately, it isn't about morality, money, or health, it's about freedom,
the freedom to choose and the freedom from being persecuted for a choice.

Besides, I've heard it's fun.