Should Marijuana Use Be Legal?

California's Proposition 19, to be voted on November 2, 2010, will decide whether to legalize marijuana use in the state. Attached is a 2 minute, 23 second pro and con news report, which includes my eldest son Kyle, a former police officer as one of the commentators. http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/state&id=7666299  What do you think?

The 40 year old War on Drugs is a disaster that has blown trillions of taxpayer dollars with little to show for it. We've tied up police officers, the judicial system and our jails to arrest, prosecute and imprison minor drug offenders at the expense of focusing our efforts and our money on violent offenders.

And in Mexico, Columbia, Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, the U.S. is helping to fight drug wars in which people are dying and communities are being destroyed. To legalize the drugs would end the wars much as they did the gangster wars when alcohol usage was again legalized in America in 1933. Did we learn nothing from that experience? Instead of Al Capone, we had Pablo Escobar and we have others today, from grand style drug lords to the peddlers on the street.

California is America's breadbasket and what is its biggest crop? Marijuana. Legalize it and tax it. What kind of logic provides dangerous drugs legally such as nicotine and alcohol and prosecutes marijuana users? It is hypocrisy when a person can pour a martini, light a cigarette and then condemn pot users.

The War on Drugs is just a grand delusion, a competition for the moral high ground, an attempt to legislate behavior that is a colossal failure that grows worse by the day.

Dick