"...When an American president is cool enough to wink-wink and nudge-nudge about taking illegal drugs in college, maybe it's time to stop laughing off sensible proposals to legalize marijuana while jacking up funding (even in times of "spending freeze") for one of the most vile, freedom-trampling public policies in U.S. history, and start being open-minded enough to recognize that there is no longer much public constituency for having the federal government police personal drug consumption. There's nothing particularly democratic about locking up hundreds of thousands of people every year for consuming unauthorized medications.
...The fact that I, like Barack Obama, the students of Hampton University, and basically half the U.S. population under the age of 60, managed to experiment with illegal drugs without getting caught is neither an indication of mass societal degeneracy nor a cause for in-group mirth. It's a telltale indicator that prohibition is a terrible idea.
I'm glad that Obama and most us kids from the right side of the tracks got away with it without coming face to face with our SWAT team/prison industrial complex, but when anybody from that silent majority then graduates to a position of enforcing the unconscionable, perpetuating a policy that has mangled millions of lives, forgive me for not laughing along with the joke."
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