Washblog

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Americans spend about $9 billion a year on Mexican pot.

Add that to the roughly $36 billion worth of domestically produced weed, and cannabis has become one of the continent's biggest cash crops. As any mob movie illustrates, mixing such "insatiable" demand for a product with statutes outlawing said product guarantees the emergence of a violent black market -- in this case, one in which Mexican drug cartels reap 62 percent of their profits from U.S.

marijuana sales.

That last stat, provided by the White House drug czar, is the silver lining. Every American concerned about Mexico's security problems should be thankful that the cartels are so dependent on marijuana, and not a genuinely hazardous substance like heroin. Why? Because that means through pot legalization, we can bring the marijuana trade out of the shadows and into the safety of the regulated economy, consequently eliminating the black market the cartels rely on. And here's the best part: We can do so without fearing any more negative consequences than we already tolerate in our keg-party culture.

Though President Obama childishly laughed at a question about legalization during his recent town hall meeting, his government implicitly admits that marijuana is safer than light beer. Indeed, as federal agencies acknowledge alcohol's key role in deadly illnesses and domestic violence, their latest anti-pot fear mongering is an ad campaign insisting -- I kid you not -- that marijuana is dangerous because it makes people zone out on their couches and diminishes video gaming skills.

(This is your government on drugs: Cirrhosis and angry tank-topped lushes beating their wives are more acceptable risks than stoners sitting in their basements ineptly playing Halo ... any questions?).

It's very simple:  legalize marijuana and you do no harm whatsoever to the public but you do immense harm to the drug cartels that also deal in more dangerous drugs like heroin.

And then there's the tax revenues.  

Appleton describes marijuana as the state's biggest cash crop. If a 2006 study by marijuana legalization advocate John Gettman is correct, it's one of the state's biggest agricultural products. He estimates that state growers sold more than $1 billion of pot that year and $1.1 billion in apples. Wheat came in a distant third at about $500 million.

It is frankly absurd that a plant that has no known harmful side-effects but is actually known to help prevent cancer is being kept illegal in order to prop up the drug cartels.

Among the more interesting pieces of news that came out while I was on vacation the first half of August was a new study in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, which found that marijuana smokers have a lower risk of head and neck cancers than people who don't smoke marijuana. Alas, this important research has been largely ignored by the news media.

While this type of study cannot conclusively prove cause and effect, the combination of this new study and existing research -- which for decades has shown that cannabinoids are fairly potent anticancer drugs -- raises a significant possibility that marijuana use is in fact protective against certain types of cancer.

It's time that Washington States government got off of drugs and starting making logical, adult decisions about the reality of marijuana in our culture and the effect the illegalization of it has had on propping up the drug cartels.

Let's win the war on drugs at last.  Let's pull their marijuana profits out from under them by legalizing the one drug that should have never been illegal to begin with.  It's not harmful, but, in fact, beneficial.  It's our second leading cash crop and can help bring in windfall profits in tax revenue to the state.  It's continuing illegalization is enabling the drug cartels to operate.

Isn't it time our government fessed up to the truth about Marijuana and ended this dangerous prohibition?

Let Sherry Appleton know you support her courage to bring this issue forward and let your own representative in Olympia know that it's time they did right thing and supported her bill too.