Madison NORML

Source: Wisconsin State Journal click here
Pubdate: August 9, 2007
Author: Gary Storck

BRIDGES FAIL WHILE WE FOCUS ON MARIJUANA

News reports say nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars is needed to fix structurally deficient U.S. bridges and highways but that states and the federal government have been unable or unwilling to come up with the money.

While ensuring the safety of our nation 's infrastructure has become a luxury we can 't afford, there is always more money to pour down the bottomless pit of marijuana prohibition. Even cancer and multiple sclerosis patients are fair game.

Thursday, Aug. 2, marked the 70th anniversary of the date President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Marijuana Tax Act into law. Ruled unconstitutional in 1969, marijuana prohibition was continued under the 1971 Controlled Substances Act.

While alcohol prohibition only lasted 14 years, marijuana prohibition is 70 and going strong. Seventy years of ceaseless reefer madness propaganda has so demonized cannabis that most elected officials stipulate to this absurd ideology without question, when taxing and regulating marijuana could solve numerous problems while generating revenue instead of wasting it.

Seventy years of lying about marijuana is too long, and it has made a mockery of American values like personal freedom and privacy, and encouraged disrespect for the law. The government should make no laws that tell us what we can or cannot put in our own bodies. Taxing and regulating marijuana is the only sensible option.

-- Gary Storck, co-founder, Madison NORML