Momentum for marijuana legalization builds

Jaybird says:

Cautiously optimistic.

Hippies I talked to in the 90’s told me that they couldn’t believe that it was still illegal in the 70’s, let alone the 80’s, let alone the 90’s. If we’re talking about how marijuana legalization is right around the corner in 2020, I won’t be surprised.

That said, I kind of wonder… why now?

Here’s my theory.

Prohibition failed, for the most part, because *EVERYBODY* got busted. Black, white, rich, poor, male, female… didn’t matter. If the cops raided, they’d arrest the folks they caught and it made great headlines.

And, soon enough, we had a Constitutional Convention to overturn Prohibition. One wonders what would have happened had the cops only busted people in the crappy part of town without also busting people in the lower middle class part of town or the middle middle class part of town.

We’d probably see something like what we had in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.

I think that law enforcement, in recent years, has started busting people in the people in the lower middle class part of town and the middle middle class part of town in ways that they had only been busting folks in the crappy part of town.

And it’d going to result in something akin to a revolt at the ballot box unless something changes. The literal dozens of state ballot initatives on such things as “medical marijuana becoming legal” and “marijuana arrests should be law enforcement’s lowest priority” are our version of a Constitutional Convention, I’d think.Report