I don’t like marijuana. I tried it a couple times many years ago, so long ago that neither the World Wide Web nor Fox News had been invented. It didn’t do much for me, and I don’t like being fuzzy and out of focus. Many years later, somebody gave me part of a marijuana-laced brownie. It made me sick. With that, you have a complete confession of my druggie life.
I also have concerns about the long-term effects of marijuana on the human brain, and am worried that its legalization will put more impaired drivers on the roads.
However, despite all these reservations, I voted to fully legalize marijuana, mainly for this reason: Prohibition doesn’t work. We found that out back in the 1920s, during the crazy social experiment when we passed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution making it a federal crime to drink alcohol. What this did was tie up government resources –think Eliot Ness and the untouchables — in a vain attempt to stop people from drinking.
Some studies showed that people actually drank more when it was illegal, just to spite the government. Unfortunately, many of them got sick and even died for drinking homemade liquor that was in fact poisonous. Prohibition was also the best thing that ever happened to organized crime. Eventually, after 13 years of this craziness, the nation rushed to repeal Prohibition.
Today, you have millions of adults who have been toking up, some for half a century. They aren’t about to stop. We have untold others who have been claiming they need marijuana for medical reasons but who are really using it recreationally.
There are several things I like about Proposal One. If it in fact succeeds in regulating the supply, quality and distribution of the drug, that will be a good thing. It also makes it illegal to sell pot to minors, and if that is strictly enforced, that will be good.
And it will provide millions – we really don’t know how much – in badly needed tax revenue to the state. However, I am somewhat uneasy about that.
Once marijuana revenues are rolling in, this may give the lunatics in the legislature another excuse to try and cut taxes, when government doesn’t have enough revenue now to do things like educate our kids. Besides that, we are making government more and more dependent on activities that are, if anything, socially destructive, like casino gambling.
Casinos, whose legalization was a mistake, are institutions designed to take money from poor people in Detroit who can’t control their impulses and send it to rich people in New Jersey, or wherever the casino owners are located. Lansing has also become dependent on tobacco taxes and the money it gets from the famous Master Tobacco Settlement case.
Big tobacco companies are paying Michigan vast sums because, after all, tobacco is perhaps the only legal product that, when you use it as directed, is very likely to eventually kill you. Michigan has been getting more than $250 million dollars a year from this fund, which we were supposed to use for medical expenses and anti-smoking programs.
We don’t; the politicians have been using it as sort of a universal piggy bank instead. I have a hunch that when the tobacco settlement payments stop in six years, it won’t be pretty.
So now, we are entering a brave new world of legalized marijuana. I hope all my worries are overblown. In this case, it would be very nice to be wrong.
