Tax revenue by the bong load? A pacified populace? Where’s the downside?

A friend of mine recently quit her job as a speech therapist in a bland Midwestern city and moved to San Francisco. Now she spends her days grilling Boca Burgers and twisting spliffs. Her life is pure sun- and THC-soaked bliss, and she needn’t worry about the law; she secured one of those medical cards that allows her a monthly dose of medical marijuana. Her affliction? PMS.

Another acquaintance gave up a successful business in Chicago to open a medical marijuana dispensary. He said the whole legalization of pot in California is akin to the Gold Rush. You gotta get in and stake your claim before every Tom, Dick, and Harry grabs a store front and a grow light.

It seems California has had cannabis in its sites for some time. In the throes of a spectacular — and ominous — fiscal collapse, the Golden State has just moved ahead with its plan legalize and to tax marijuana. The Sacramento Bee reports:

What a day it was in California on Tuesday.

At the state Capitol, lawmakers debated legalizing marijuana for the masses so it could be taxed to raise money for drug treatment programs.

Apparently a bit of madness on California’s part, equipping the populace with the very substance whose tax revenues would fund its eradication, but it wasn’t solely drug treatment programs the state most likely wants to fund. It’s hard not to imagine that a hefty tax ($50.00 per ounce) on marijuana would help balance the state’s imploding budget. The LA Times reports that “the Board of Equalization estimates that the state could reap up to $1.3 billion in sorely needed tax revenue, and proponents have skillfully wielded the budget crisis to boost support for the measure.” And most Californians seem to agree: “Polls show that 56% of Californians back legalizing marijuana.”

The rest of the U.S. is starting to come round to the green stuff. “Across the country, the numbers are somewhat lower, but nevertheless momentum is building for a reconsideration of marijuana laws covering both medicinal and recreational use,” the LA Times story continues:

Many states now treat marijuana offenses as mere infractions, not subject to jail time. The American Medical Assn. recently reversed its long-held position and urged more research into the drug’s properties.

Even New Jersey has jumped on the bandwagon. According to The Wall Street Journal, New Jersey’s legislature just passed a bill to legalize medical marijuana. The state insists, however, that it is not following California’s example:

Chris Christie, the Garden State’s Republican governor-elect (and former U.S. attorney) said medical marijuana in California is “completely out of control,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Still, Christie said he supports “the idea of medical marijuana for seriously ill people for pain relief to them,” though he was wary of what he called “loopholes” in the bill, such as allowing the health department to expand the list of qualifying conditions.

Qualifying conditions notwithstanding, a little old fashioned herbal escapism seems to be in order these days, what with all the dire news. Day after day of being told you’ll never find a job if you don’t already have one, or that the job you currently have is just going to become … well … pretty shitty, because the need for increased productivity without increased manpower (what Karl Marx describes as goosing up variable surplus value via the intensification of work) has been urgently felt. Ice caps are melting. Flesh-eating viruses are teeming on that chicken breast you just took out of the freezer. One can understand why the public would welcome California’s brave move to legalize something that been taboo for about forty years.

"I'll be baked": Governor Schwarzenegger leads by example.

Of course, the process won’t be easy; the federal government has got to have its say. The LA Times article continues:

Cannabis may be the nation’s largest cash crop, but marijuana remains a Schedule I drug, deemed by the federal government to have a high potential for abuse, no accepted medical value and illegal to use under all circumstances. Perhaps Californians have been emboldened by their pioneering role in legalizing medicinal marijuana, but in truth, the conflict between state and federal law has had serious consequences for users and distributors caught in the federal web. Yes, the Obama administration now has a formal policy of ignoring medical marijuana activity in states that have passed laws permitting its use, and the Justice Department has halted raids on dispensaries and prosecutions of sick patients. But that is merely a truce. Widespread legalization for recreational purposes is almost guaranteed to upset the delicate detente with Washington.

It seems that the Obama administration is playing it close to the vest, keeping in reserve its trumping authority to harsh California’s mellow.

We already have our Prozac and Paxil to make us forgot about contemporary American life’s sorrows, not to mention the mind-addling influence of television.

Perhaps that’s a good thing. After all, wouldn’t it be convenient for a crumbling state to have a populace that is anesthetized to ongoing disintegration? Distressed bridges and yawning potholes would no longer seem like such terrible things once they’ve been obscured by clouds of pot smoke. Those college tuition increases which caused such a hue and cry a few months ago? Who cares when UCLA will let you smoke out after that Freshman Comp class that is costing you $12,000 a semester, but is taught by someone who make $4,000 a semester? All that flapjack about Goldman Sachs destroying your future prospects of ever joining that class that used to go by the name “middle?” Who cares when microwavable burritos are but a Circle K away, conveniently positioned to sate the “munchies?”

So I’m going to be a killjoy and say that legalizing marijuana for general use (For the record, I think medical use is perfectly legitimate) at this point would not be a good thing. This is not the time to check out with a drug that is known for making people dopily complacent. The more anger and frustration that builds and festers, the better. If anything, escapism through alcohol results in a nasty hangover that reminds you why you drank that fifth of Stoli in the first place. But pot? The only thing you’ll be left with is cellulite and a head full of blighted brain cells, ones which can barely conceive of resistance, let alone plan it.

In A Scanner Darkly, science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick envisions a future Orange County where a large portion of the population is strung out on a delightful yet ultimately deadly drug called Substance D. The crumbling cities are patrolled by brutal police and most abusers hang out in their tract homes in subdivisions long fallen to ruin. The novel is, in other words, a true glimpse of things to come (perhaps Dick really was visited by the prophet Elijah, as he claimed in his later, crazier years), because, besides envisioning a California populated by drug addicts, it imagines a federal government that is responsible for creating those addicts while claiming to do the opposite in a series of drug prevention programs and with a phalanx of narcs. What better way to control an entire populace than by hooking them out some incapacitating substance? Certainly Aldous Huxley also saw the genius in this when he spoke of soma, the beloved narcotic of the denizens of his Brave New World.

We already have our Prozac and Paxil to make us forgot about contemporary American life’s sorrows, not to mention the mind-addling influence of television. Adding marijuana to the mix would only ensure that the American people would never rise up in revolt. They’d barely be able to rise from their La-Z-boys.

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