Mary J Wanna

I saw a line in the news this week about how one per cent of the electricity produced in the United States is used in the production of marijuana, i.e. it's used for grow lights for indoor pot farms. That is a heck of a lot of pot.

I'm all in favor of legalizing marijuana, matter of fact, I'm in favor of legalizing all drugs. I think people are smart enough to figure this stuff out for themselves, and it certainly isn't any of the government's business. But I don't think it is going to happen anytime soon.

The prohibition of alcohol (early in the 20th Century in the US)  is the example commonly given of why the laws banning drugs should be repealed. Then I had a thought. I have heard numerous stories about how prohibition came to be (Carrie Nation and rampant alcoholism), but I never heard anything about how it came to be repealed. Big campaign for years to get prohibition enacted, the prohibition lasted for several years and then it was repealed. What happened? What happened is that half of the people in the country wanted a drink.

It's a little hard to tell what's going on with marijuana. Accurate numbers are hard to come by because, well, it's illegal. Near as we can tell though it's the biggest cash crop in several states. It's easy to see why. When a bushel of pot goes for ten thousand dollars, and a bushel of corn goes for three or four, you don't have to grow a whole lot of pot to make a big pile of cash. On the other hand, only about five percent of our population are regular pot smokers. That's a considerable number, but it's nothing like the number of people who drink.

Rational, reasonable arguments are not going get the laws changed. There is going to have to be a sea change in people's attitudes before anything happens. It's possible that the drug war going on in Mexico might trigger a ground swell of opinion, but I kind of doubt it. I mean it's in Mexico, that's another country, that doesn't have anything to do with US. Oops, sorry, a little sarcasm slipped out there.

If some rich guy, like Murdoch or Bill Gates, wanted to mount a media campaign, they could probably get the laws changed eventually. But I don't think that is likely to happen. Right now too many people are making too much money off of marijuana for anyone on either side of the law to want it to become legal.