Proposition 203

We've been getting a lot of phone calls from various groups trying to get us to vote against Proposition 203, which if passed would permit medically-supervised use of marijuana. I'm not here to debate the fine points of the Proposition itself, since it is my general belief that ballot propositions are so closely-worded you need to be a lawyer or a specialist to make sense of them.

But I do wish to make two points.

The first is that one of the phone calls against Prop 203 was funded by the Arizona Cardinals football team. Wait a second. You guys get the taxpayers to build you a new stadium, and then you turn into an advocacy group? Am I the only one who thinks that a commercial enterprise that was bankrolled in part by the taxpayers ought to have the good grace to keep its mouth firmly shut? And I ask you this - how many Cardinals fans have a brewski at the game? If you're going to piss and moan about destructive drugs, you may as well drop the hypocrisy and add alcohol to the list. Oh, but that might eat into the Cardinals bottom line! Can't have that.

The second is that when I was going through my many chemo treatments, if my oncologist (the inestimable Dr. Sarkodee-Adoo) had permitted me to smoke a little marijuana to help with the daunting side-effects of chemotherapy, I would have. In the words of Captain Willard from the movie Apocalypse Now, "Absolutely goddamn right." I'd probably have tried to eat a hash brownie, though it probably wouldn't have stayed down long enough to do any good.

And I'm hardly a stoner.

The pro-marijuana groups make me chuckle though. They always have some frail bald woman who is undergoing savage chemo and asks "Please, if it'll help me get through this hell, can I please smoke a little marijuana?" And right next to her are a bunch of stoners with scraggly hair and seed burns on their shirts saying "Like, it's totally natural, dude." Get your message in order here. Middle America, whose votes you need to pass things like this, sees only the stoners and thinks "Well, I'm not in favor of that." And so the frail bald woman continues to suffer.

It's like the gay rights advocacy groups. All Middle America remembers are the guys in tiny leather shorts dry-humping one another in the gay pride parades, and thus the message is lost. I suppose as a general proposition I accept the notion that people have the right to wear tiny leather shorts and dry-hump one another, but it isn't a question of what's right or not; it's a question of how you manage your message so you don't alienate people who are not generally committed to your cause in the first place.

And in closing, I offer this thought. The "War on Drugs" has failed. Prohibition failed. All of these attempts to legislate morality inevitably fail. At what point does one accept the inevitable - and tax it appropriately? Personally, I'd rather marijuana be legal, regulated and taxed than see all that money flow into the hands of drug cartels and smugglers. Since it is obvious that marijuana use cannot ever be stopped by passing ever more draconian laws, the choice (it seems to me) is who you want the money to go to: your local municipality, or the drug cartels. I know which way I lean.