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ESTABLISH LEGAL MARIJUANA USE AND REGULATION

The time has come to legalize and regulate marijuana use and commerce.  It is time to:

1 ) Start managing and regulating the widespread marijuana commerce to actively serve the public, just like we do with alcohol, including taxation, ensuring safe ingredients, limiting what is sold, when, where and to whom.

2 ) Stop funding the insanity of the illegal drug trade that brings dangerous criminals into our communities and generates violent anarchy in Mexico and elsewhere.

3 ) Accept that the replay of our Puritanical obsession with prohibition utterly ignores reality and is impossible to enforce -- recreational use of marijuana is simply part and parcel of our culture, even if many of us, myself included, don't participate.

4 ) End the drug war quadrupling of incarceration in our country that is bankrupting state and local governments while we pay commissions to police departments for every inner-city kid they aggressively stop/frisk and arrest for simple possession, generating enormous negative impacts of discriminatory policing, insatiable growth of a prison-industrial complex, and long-term destruction of families, employment prospects and chances for productive citizenship.

Doctrinaire arguments against using a constitutional amendment miss the main point.  A "perfect" vehicle for significant new law is a fantasy that never appears.  In the last 50 years, we have unfortunately learned that this is exactly the kind of law that must be generated by citizen constitutional initiative because state legislatures utterly lack the backbone to enact and uphold this kind of structural change.

The time has come.  Vote 'yes' to establish legal use and regulation of marijuana.

CHRISTOPHER N.  TENNIS

Boulder