On Pot: I Rest My Case

The war on drugs is a fucking disaster, except for the law enforcement and prison industries, who make a pretty penny off its wrongheaded persecution of small-timers when white-collar cocks grift billions in wars we don't need using the bodies of those they would save from the horrors of marijuana. Can't we all agree on that?

But seriously, the LA Times rag actually has something worth reading, and it's all about the green. Both kinds:

Pot is called biggest cash crop "For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America's biggest cash crop. Now they're citing government statistics to prove it. A report released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion -- far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops...." READ MORE

The best part of the piece is listening to the ass-backwards White House Office of National Drug Control Policy theorize why legalizing such a cash cow would be bad:

"Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, cited examples of foreign countries that have struggled with big crops used to produce cocaine and heroin. 'Coca is Colombia's largest cash crop and that hasn't worked out for them, and opium poppies are Afghanistan's largest crop, and that has worked out disastrously for them,' Riley said. 'I don't know why we would venture down that road.'"

Uh, first of all, we're talking about differentiating weed from heroin and coke, so kudos to Riley for linking the two back together again in attempt to keep the guilt-by-proximity criminalization streak alive. Bonus points also for being disingenuous about those particular markets, which are still going gangbusters, and refusing to explain why they haven't "worked out." And you thought you paid government officials to actually know and share specific information.

I've interviewed the ONDCP retards before, and the best evidence they had for why marijuana is dangerous is a story about three idiots who tried to save a friend who was overdosing on ecstasy by stuffing her mouth full of pot. Brilliance. That piece is infinitely more interesting -- and exhaustive, I might add -- than the LA Times mea culpa, if only because it lays bare the ONDCP's pathetic efforts to fight common sense.

But using the same tired cliche the LA Times uses, the genie is out of the bottle. Might as well legalize it, like Peter Tosh sang, so we can monetize it. Our economy sucks balls as it is anyway.