Marijuana Kudos

Kudos to the good folks of Washington State and Colorado for voting in favor of common sense.  It is now legal in both states to possess personal use amounts of cannabis in private.
Why is this important?  To answer this question factually (I'm trusting), I turned to the NORML website and copied the following nearly verbatim (the non-italicized comments are mine):

1.) Marijuana is the third most popular recreational drug in America, behind only alcohol and tobacco, and has been used by nearly 100 million Americans;

2.) Marijuana is far less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.  Around 50,000 people die each year from alcohol poisoning.  Similarly, more than 400,000 deaths each year are attributed to tobacco smoking.  By comparison, marijuana is nontoxic and cannot cause death by overdose.  (I assume this ignores the carcinogenic effects of smoke intake.); 

3.) Enforcing marijuana prohibition costs taxpayers an estimated $10 billion annually and results in the arrest of more than 750,000 individuals per year (a disproportionate number of whom are young, black males) - far more than the total number of arrested individuals for all violent crimes combined, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault;

4.) Driven by the Drug War, the U.S. prison population is six to ten times as high as most Western European nations. The United States is a close second only to Russia in its rate of incarceration; 

5.) Of all the negative consequences of marijuana prohibition, none is as tragic as the denial of medicinal cannabis to the tens of thousands of patients who could benefit from its therapeutic use.

Of course, cannabis is still illegal at the federal level and currently in all but two states. Undoubtedly, other states will follow suit now that Washington State and Colorado have paved the way (except here in the Southeast where social change is always slow to come).  A great deal of work remains with the two states in developing implementation legislation and at the federal level reconciling the federal and state legal differences. When asked about going after weed users in legal states, President Obama is on record saying, "We've got bigger fish to fry." 

As noted in the previous post, prohibition can be a very bad idea, whether applicable to alcohol, abortion or marijuana.  After years of following a terribly failed prohibitionist policy for which we are paying a huge price, both in human and monetary terms, the time for change is now.  Two states have stepped up to the plate and, hopefully, others will soon follow their lead.