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SOAKING WET WISCONSIN NO MODEL FOR MAINSTREAMING MARIJUANA

Legalize pot in Wisconsin? Sure, as long as it isn't sold as any more of a "medicine" than the most popular legal high ( alcohol ).  In the area of government-sanctioned inebriation, what's fair should be fair.  Besides, pot advocates have had some decent reasons for saying theirs is the safer buzz.

And then I read about a man in Colorado - where marijuana is already legal - who reportedly shot his wife after eating too much pot-laced candy.  Another man ate too many marijuana-infused cookies and jumped off a hotel balcony to his death.

Candy might be dandy, but in Colorado, sweets can be downright dangerous, too.

"I'm very concerned about the increasing permissiveness toward marijuana," said Dr.  Richard Brown, a physician and addictions specialist at UW-Madison.  He said it can be addictive and interferes with users' motivation and ability to learn.

"I'm very worried that more lenient state laws about marijuana are creating a lower perception of risk among high school students," Brown said.  "Such changes in perception are usually followed in the next few years by increases in use."

Dane County Board member Leland Pan - who co-sponsored a successful, nonbinding referendum last month to legalize marijuana in Wisconsin - had a different take.

While he doesn't endorse getting high, he said "prohibition does nothing to reduce usage or prevent usage."

Marijuana's effects also don't tend to be as incapacitating as alcohol's, according to UW-Madison physician and bioethicist Dr.  Norman Fost, who holds a master's degree in public health.  Pan agreed, saying "the social harms that come from marijuana are much less severe than alcohol."

Kevin Florek, CEO of the Madison-based nonprofit substance abuse treatment center Tellurian UCAN, said legal pot would probably spur more pot use.  His agency's workers have also seen pot play the role of "gateway drug" and witnessed its negative effects on users' careers and marriages.

But even he noted that marijuana might have legitimate medicinal uses and that it typically doesn't lead to the kind of violence often associated with heavy drinking.

I suppose you could argue I've been brainwashed by the faulty logic of prohibition and the costly and largely failed American war on drugs, but the criminalization of marijuana is among the things that keeps me from seeking a high that I enjoyed and found relatively harmless when I was a younger ( and more rebellious ) man.

To bring pot into my home with my three young children? When getting caught and convicted for drug possession would probably get me fired? When drug testing is a given at most large employers these days?

It's not worth the risk, and I bet a lot of 40-something folks with jobs, kids and mortgages would say the same thing.

But if picking up a pan of THC-infused brownies at Copps were as legal and socially acceptable as picking up a six-pack ...  ?

Who knows how many of us otherwise straight-laced, recreational buzz-seekers wouldn't so much replace one buzz ( alcohol ) with another ( pot ), but rather, enjoy both.  Theoretically, the amount of time Wisconsinites spend legally intoxicated in a pot- and liquor-legal Wisconsin could double, as would the chances for intoxication-related problems - from drunken driving and violence, to marriage discord, job loss and academic failure.  No doubt it's an "extreme injustice," as Fost said, to lock people up for years for marijuana possession when "what you need to do to get thrown in jail for drunk driving - you really have to work at that."

Or that, as Pan said, legalization could help stamp out the gangs and crime endemic to the current illegal marijuana industry.

Or that legalization could open up a whole new source of tax revenue.  If it did, Florek would like to see at least some of those tax dollars sent to agencies like his, because there is a "major, major shortage of government funding for treatment of addictions."

Significantly increased funding for substance abuse treatment would probably be the best - if most ironic - result of legalization.

The worst would be that pot becomes so socially and culturally accepted that it becomes difficult to take the drug's negative ramifications seriously - because, well, it's so socially and culturally accepted.

That's basically the history of Wisconsin's relationship with alcohol, which is so woven into our existence that even nation-leading binge-drinking and drunken-driving rates can't spur lawmakers to make first-offense drunken driving a crime or raise the beer tax.

The question is whether the benefits of legal pot are worth the risk of another such dysfunctional relationship.