I don’t use marijuana, and don’t plan to start, even if the voters enact Proposal I in November. Now that the statute of limitations has run out, I can confess that I tried it – twice — more than forty years ago, and didn’t like the way it made me feel.
If I need relaxing, I prefer a good glass of excellent wine any day. With the exception of buffered aspirin, that’s all there is to my life on drugs. Are you bored yet?
But there are tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Michigan residents who do smoke marijuana. They now buy or grow it illegally, pretend to need it for medical reasons, and sometimes smoke stuff that may have been sprayed with chemicals or mixed with dangerous things. What profits there are tend to go to shady characters.
That leads me to the reluctant conclusion that we might as well legalize it, regulate it, and have the state get some tax revenue out of it. When I say reluctant conclusion, I’m not talking so much about using marijuana as the mentality that goes along with legalizing it.
That makes it an activity that the state now, in some form, sanctions as okay. We will be told that the tax revenue is going for some good cause, like the schools. But based on past experience that merely means that they will take away other money meant for the schools.
Additionally, once any government gets a new revenue stream, it tends to get hooked very quickly on that revenue stream, which means Michigan will have a strong interest in encouraging continuing and even increasing use of marijuana. That leads me to the nightmare vision of a state where the roads are lousy, the infrastructure is poor and there aren’t many new good jobs.
But at least you’ll be able to come to our state, sit on the rim of a pothole, and get high. Okay, enough of my deep gloomy pessimism. The truth is, recreational marijuana is now part of many people’s lives, and we might as well accept reality, and do what we can to regulate it.
When I say regulate it, I mean for the good of the consumer, and everyone else. If you know anything about history, you know that in one of this nation’s crazier moments, we decided, right after World War I, to completely outlaw drinking alcohol.
Prohibition was a big flop, much as was attempting to outlaw marijuana. But while alcohol was outlawed, hundreds of people got deathly ill and more than a few even died from drinking awful bootleg liquor, stuff that often contained poisonous chemicals.
Similarly, odds are you don’t really know where that pot you bought came from. When we legalized medical marijuana ten years ago, we did nothing to set up a proper supply and distribution system, with the result being that we created a mess.
Now we should use this opportunity, especially if this initiative passes, to set up a sensible and proper supply chain system for both medical and recreational marijuana. Everyone from the bean counters to the consumers would stand to benefit from this.
We might also look at how we tax and regulate beer and wine and liquor.
I know, all that makes too much sense. I’ll try not to do that again, any time soon.
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