Pubdate: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 Source: Fort Collins Coloradoan (CO) Copyright: 2011 The Fort Collins Coloradoan Contact: http://www.coloradoan.com/customerservice/contactus.html Website: http://www.coloradoan.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1580 Author: Dan MacArthur Note: Dan MacArthur is a Fort Collins writer. PROHIBITION AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY Prohibition doesn't work and usually does more harm than the problem it is aimed at fixing. That was the clear conclusion of last week's fascinating yet excruciatingly endless Ken Burns PBS documentary on Prohibition. While watching, I couldn't help but be struck by the parallels as we decide whether to embark on our own futile experiment in prohibition. Fort Collins voters on Nov. 1 will decide whether to ban medical marijuana operations and medical marijuana-infused products within city limits. Approval of such measures allows cities and counties to opt out of the Colorado Medical Marijuana Code. Predictably, the proposal has incited hyperbole on both sides. One wails about the sacred mission to protect children from the evil weed. The other is inflamed about this cruel effort to withhold the healing medicine that salves the afflicted. Both sides do their proponents no favors with their extreme arguments. Youth will not be seduced in a reefer madness fantasy. Those looking for a buzz will always find the herb - or any other intoxicant - somewhere. The vast majority still will just say no. On the other side, the ganja-cures-all-ills argument is - truth be told - largely a sham. Save the indignant outrage. I'll be the first to acknowledge the great medicinal value of marijuana for treatment of many maladies. It is a natural substance often far more effective than pharmacological pill-popping. Curiously, however, it seems many strapping young men are afflicted with maladies only reefer can cure. It's clear that the medical marijuana movement also is a stalking horse for legalization. Instead of trying to hold back the relentless tide - putting so much effort into trying to control this uncontrollable substance - perhaps it's high time to get serious about legalization locally and nationally. Efforts to mandate morality never work. Keeping marijuana illegal is just raising the price. And the price we pay for the crime that comes with it. Let the government get some of the action in taxes and take away the economic incentive for the drug cartels literally making a killing for huge profits. As the noble but misguided experiment in the 1920s and '30s well demonstrates, prohibition doesn't work. Getting rid of the substance in question - even if possible - doesn't diminish the demand. If anything, it might even grow because of our perverse attraction to the forbidden. We never seem to learn. Fort Collins tried this once before. The city went dry in 1896. The sorrowful event caused The Weekly Courier to lament in verse: "The melancholy days have come/ The saddest yet, we fear./For every man in town/ Must now give up his beer." But the men and probably at least a few ladies found a way around the booze ban, wetting their whistles clandestinely or at a host of establishments just beyond city limits. Fort Collins later allowed the sale of less-powerful 3.2 beer in 1933 with the national repeal of Prohibition and finally said goodbye to dry in 1969. Prohibition only drives the prohibited goods underground and to the fringes. They spring up elsewhere in places less subject to oversight and more prone to crime. If we want to end the black market, free bootleggers from the herbal underground and let them operate in the open. Marijuana can be legalized without everything going to pot. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr.