Here in California there's the on-going debate over legalization of marijuana. Voters said yes to medicinal pot, but unfortunately doctors are providing licenses to just about anyone for any medical problem. And if you can't get your own doctor's approval, you just pay to see a medicinal pot doctor for the $125 license and then have no trouble finding a dispensary near you! In my area alone, there were over 20 dispensaries until the Feds came in and systematically have tried to close all of them, using tactics of zoning issues to confiscating properties of the renters of those spaces! You also can't buy certain chemicals now w/o a license due to home hydroponics growing! It's insane, but everyone around here seems to be smoking weed or growing it or both!!! I say we decriminalize it, legalize it, have the big cig companies take growing over, and stock the shelves with the cartons. Both the State and the Feds could impose taxes on it that would raise revenue to repair infrastructure or go towards medical research, etc... endless possibilities. And at least in Cali people WOULD pay huge amounts to get the supply w/o all the shadiness of the current system. The jail system would also be freed up for space and the failed "War on Drugs" would come to an end. Might even affect the border war too. I am not a liberal either but a conservative! I say we failed and need to just legalize and tax the hell out of the product for revenue. I've known pot smokers all my life and not one ever posed a serious threat to anyone. Most live on SS due to some claimed physical disability and smoke all day at home, eat, and play video games or watch tv. They are non-productive parts of society anyway. So why play the drug game that involves law enforcement, jail space, and the Fed intrusions? Why can't they pick up their vice at Costco along with taxed normal cigs and alcohol??? Why is it legal to get drugs that are synthesized like Vicodin, Dilaudid, Oxy, etc... and yet castigate those that smoke cannabis? The plant has been villified long enough. During WW2, Henry Ford made a Hemp car and due to bad publicity by DuPont and Hearst, it failed to sell in 1942. It was lighter and more damage-resistant than conventional cars. Ford wanted to build a 4-engine strategic bomber out of the material which could have taken German flak MUCH BETTER than a B-17 or 24 and yet those designs for the Green Arrow also led to nothing even though the US military used hemp in 100 different ways during the war as engine lubricant, parachute rigging, firefighting hoses on naval vessels, and so on...

The Hemp Mobile of 1942 with Ford taking an axe to it to show how resistant it was to damage! He called this ground tech Chemurgian science, but DuPont was opposed to any hemp competing with plastics used in war production so they informed Hearst who ran the newspapers and started the outcry. As a direct result, Ford could not sell the car and his bomber idea was never more than sketches. Most Ford books skip over both the car and bomber design as if that part of their history doesn't exist! Had it been legal, then imagine all the lives that could have been saved. Instead, US bombers relied on synthetics instead, the B-26 made with 400+ plastic parts!!! http://www.blogcdn.com/green.autoblog.com/media/2007/07/fordax_resized.jpg