Colorado, here they come

A full week into Colorado’s bold experiment with recreational marijuana, no specific wrath o’ God has been reported there.  The state is in the Polar Vortex, but so is New Orleans.  (Then again, Pat Robertson claimed that the Crescent City deserved Hurricane Katrina because of all the godless Sodomites in residence.  But that’s another diatribe.)

There hasn’t been an uptick in public nudity in Denver, and that’s good.  If you’re so stoned that you’d consider a bare romp al fresco there in January, you’re hopefully too stoned to correctly use a doorknob.  When the widespread anarchy hoped for by the Rabid Right fails to appear, look for them to fall back on their big guns: comparisons to Nazis, slave owners and Unitarians.

I ask my kooky brethren and sistern to look at the orderly lines of folks braving the arctic blast to buy legal weed.  They’re your neighbours, teachers, accountants, mechanics, nurses, first responders: solid citizens who merely want to buy their drug of choice without stigma or incarceration.

Media coverage of the new law has ranged from amusing to infuriating.  Many reporters can’t refrain from mixing actual information with lame jokes, smirking like rookie tokers.  CNN seeks out the more lurid aspects of the issue, but that’s its stock-in-trade anymore.  Conservative pundit David Brooks is at peace with his own youthful indiscretions with THC, but duns those adults who continue to puff.

Fine.  Let’s get all this bullshit aired out.  Hysteria shrivels under continued examination.  Take, for example, the argument of pot opponents that American culture can’t sustain another drug as common as alcohol and tobacco.  They talk as if weed suddenly appeared this week like a K-Mart Blue Light Special.  Equal protection of the law aside, let’s address the fact that it’s been with us for generations.  It’s here, it’s dear, get over it.  It’s not going away.  Why not stop persecuting and prosecuting, and start making some serious coin from it?

And that’s the crux of it.  As soon as Big Business is convinced the feds won’t intervene, the corporations will move in and the smirking reporters will move on.  Even this early in the infant industry, the money going into state-of-the-art grow ops is impressive.  Obama would be wise to let the Colorado and Washington state situations play out.  And Congress, which excels at inertia, should be glad to ignore this, especially in an election year.

There is a downside, of course.  Increased acceptance of weed could lead to more abuse.  Teenaged brains don’t fare well with THC.  There’s a lot of speculation that DUI’s  and dependence problems will increase.  But there’s no turning back.  Prohibition doesn’t work, anyway.  Let’s start the public discussion in earnest and make adjustments.  The U.S. will be stronger and healthier for it, and I’ll smoke to that.