Pubdate: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 Source: Trentonian, The (NJ) Copyright: 2010 The Trentonian Contact: http://www.trentonian.com Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1006 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California) A FALTERING BID TO LEGALIZE MARIJUANA The late comedian George Carlin used to explain why marijuana would never be legalized: The pothead committee members in charge of the legalization campaign would never be able to remember what they did with the petition. "Hey, man, I thought you had it," says one committee member. "No, man, I thought you had it?" says a second member. "Far out, man!" says a third member, staring off into space. Actually, pothead committee members and the whereabouts of the petition turn out not to be problem. The petition was found and filed, and a legalization proposition has been approved for the California ballot in the November election. But polls show the proposition hemorrhaging support. Prospective "No" votes are running ahead of prospective "yes" votes. In California! The last redoubt of trendy impulses! Analysts say the legalization proposition is faltering in significant measure due to fuddy-duddy parents who are having second thoughts. Letting quasi-legalization get a foot in the backdoor in the form of "medical" marijuana, as California, New Jersey and other states have moved to do, is one thing. But letting it in all the way, through the front door? Parents, the analysts say, are having their doubts about that. Even parents who agree that the "war on drugs" is a costly boondoggle, it's said. Even parents who have partaken of cannabis themselves and actually inhaled. Parents are asking themselves (or so say the analysts): "Do we really want Junior and Missy diverting their movie and pizza dollars to pot buys and glazing themselves over with a marijuana high -- maybe while behind the wheel of the family sedan?" Yes, arguably, pot is less a menace to public safety than that other legalized drug, alcohol. But do we really want to add spaced-out tokers to the lethal mix of whoozy and/or fully inebriated motorists already loose on the highways? Another legalization obstacle: Those fuddy-duddy parents persist in believing that marijuana is a gateway drug to the harder stuff, for some, despite tendentious studies to the contrary. And is the notion really all that nutty? Let's face it, it's hard to picture a teenage kid initiating himself or herself into first-time drug experimentation by assembling a spoon, a piece of rubber tubing, a syringe and a needle and then mainlining heroin. You can bet that such drug users did their experimentation with pot and moved on to other stuff. (Which is not the same as saying that all pot smokers move on to heroin.) Other claims of legalization's wondrous public benefactions are also encountering skeptical resistance, polling indicates For example, advocates declare that legalized marijuana would put the nasty drug traffickers out of business. And apart from the law enforcement savings, revenues from a tax on legalized pot would help upright California's capsizing, titanic public sector. But the two claims tend to contradict each other. Illegal pot -- i.e., untaxed and therefore cheaper pot -- would undercut the market for the state-regulated stuff. Resourceful, adaptive drug-trafficking nasties surely would be more than equal to the competitive challenge. So goes the thinking of many prospective "no" voters, anyway, according to the analysts. Some of the analysts go so far as to suggest that the California proposition is faltering because grandiose, utopian schemes are going out of fashion as fast as "Change You Can Believe In" has turned into trillion-dollar annual deficits, 10 percent unemployment and the status quo ante in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. This analysis seems to be telling us that Obama is now available to be blamed for all things, as his predecessor once was, and California's lagging legalization campaign is just one more item to be added to an ever-expanding list. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake