LEGALIZE!

Massachusetts voters are being asked whether or not to legalize the recreational use and sale of marijuana. You have no doubt seen the commercials from both sides.  We thought that today would be a good time to drop some knowledge on the matter.

- Marijuana is the least harmful drug out there that is used recreationally, incuding legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco.

- Alcohol, which is legal and regulated, is a far greater killer of Americans than marijuana, both suddenly (overdoses and accidents) and long-term. Alcohol kills about 15,000 Americans a year just in OUI accidents.

- Much of the fight against the end of marijuana persecution is being paid for by both Big Al (alcohol suppliers and distributors) and Little Al (bars, retail alcohol stores), in a direct effort to avoid losing market shares for their far more dangerous product to a less harmful alternative like marijuana.

- The same can also be said about Big Pharma, who are to blame for the Oxycontin plague killing our children right now.  They want the status quo, with doctors pushing their pills onto people who will get hooked and turn to heroin when their prescriptions run out... while US soldiers are dying in a mountain hell defending Afghan poppy fields.

- You are in far more danger of a drug-related death from visiting a doctor (and his/her hook-you-on-painkillers prescription pad) just once with a broken bone than you are from a lifetime spent making weekly visits to the den of even the most shadowy purveyor of black market marijuana.

- Every instant that a Massachusetts cop spends focusing on marijuana (and even in  decriminalized Massachusetts, cops spend countless hours pursuing the black market marijuana trade, and rabidly consider anything more than a sandwich bag full of the stuff to be a crime worthy of a murderer's jail time) is an instant that he/she is not pursuing far more dangerous and harmful criminal activity.

- Police are safer in a world with legalized marijuana. They will be freed from the raids which get them shot by drug dealers. They will lower their number of citizen confrontations, which also gets them (and some citizens) shot.

- While some cops will tell you that maarijuana should stay illegal, you have to remember that they have worked their whole lives as the foot soldiers in the failed War On Drugs, and consider the fact that people are voting to legalize weed as disrespect to their brave (if misdirected) efforts. It ends up as an Us vs Them scenario where it is almost impossible to expect a balanced view.

- Even then, and even with intense inter-profession pressure for law enforcement people to be anti-pot, it is sort of funny to see the main pro-marijuana commercials on TV featuring calm policemen speaking about the benefits of legalized marijuana, while the main anti-marijuana commercial is a ridiculous paranoid fantasy production.

- Note that the commercial that I speak of, the one where the sheltered soccer mom awakes to a world with legalized marijuana, is contemptible. The only scenario shown that doesn't exist already is the daughter grabbing for the edibles (from a window in a shop that she wouldn't be allowed into), and the son buying weed legally from a licensed, regulated purveyor. The increase in crime inference is a lie exposed by states where marijuana is leglized. The man shown in the commercial billowing smokestack-style clouds of smoke would most likely be doing so with weed being either legal or illegal.

- What the commercial doesn't show is Mom drinkng  bottle of wine and backing the car over the daughter, hubby drinking a 12 pack and smacking Mom, the son getting post-concussion syndrome from organized sports and becoming hooked on the pain medication that the doctors provide him, the cops- freed from pursuing harmless weed- chasing actual dangerous criminals, and the pot shop paying taxes that pour money into the schools and law enforcement apparatus of the town that they serve.

- Weed shops will take the sale of marijuana out of the hands of a drug dealer who would happily sell it to a child and put the sale of marijuana into the hands of a licensed, regulated businessman who will then diffuse tax money into the community. A child would be persona non grata in a weed shop, a potential business-wrecking failure.

- I can only speak for Buzzards Bay, but if I could take one of those several dozen empty stores on Main Street and replace it with a guaranteed winner of a business sporting a pre-existing and sizable in-town client base... you'd better come up with a better argument than some 1930s Reefer Madness nonsense when telling me why not.

- A vote for Legalization immediately takes about a quarter to a half million of our harmless citizens from Outlaw status to the status of respectable, revenue generating lawful citizens. This vote will also inflict immense damage on the actual harmful drug people, the guys running and selling it.

- If legalized marijuana is not overtaxed, it will indeed slaughter the black market. Overtaxed, it will generate a black market.

- A legalized marijuana society with a mortally wounded black market will make it much more difficult for children to acquire marijuana.

-  Home-grown weed, not subject to taxes, will generate income for the state via sales of gardening materials. It's a piddling sum, granted... but it is more than we take in under the status quo, with people potentially facing years in prison for growing marijuana in-home.

- You are in far greater danger of being killed in a mass shooting by someone really into alt-right conspiracy or religion than you are by someone who has been driven to kill by his marijuana use. Marijuana has a mellowing effect, and her users are more likely to kill a box of Pop Tarts than they are to kill everyone in an elementary school.

- States with legalized marijuana yield interesting stats on weed and driving. 66% of road fatalities involving marijuana also involve alcohol, with alcohol being the far more likely culprit for the crash.  A lesser % involve other, harder drugs. Of the remainder, Causality becomes an issue. Was the weed responsible for the crash? It's a tough sell in a snowy, mountainous state like Colorado. It's also a tough sell when the stats consider a stoner driver stopped at a red light who is then plowed into and killed by a drunk driver to be a "road death with marijuana present in the bloodstream."

- The fun part about the weed/driving stats is that, once you eliminate the drunks and the blizzard deaths, you have a number of deaths in the teens/single digits, from among a population of 10 million or so. Any insurance agent will tell you what the pro-persecution commercials won't tell you... the driver with weed in his blood is statistically less likely to get into a fatal road accident than a guy without weed is. We're not saying that the stoned driver is safer, as stats can vary year to year and a stoner bus accident could raise the % in a given period. We're just saying that the present information doesn't suggest that persecution is warranted.

- Legalized marijuana will pour millions and eventually billions into the state's coffers, money which can be used for better schools, better roads, better (and, via legalization, more efficient/useful) police... just a better life in general, and that's just for the non-smokers. It will be a considerably better life for the hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts smokers who are currently Outlaws under these Jim Crow-era laws.

- Understand that an anti-legalization vote wont make marijuana go away. It was out there before, and usage is widespread. It will just keep smokers in the black market, untaxed, unregulated, pursued endlessly by costly and mis-utilized police squads.

- If your views on marijuana have evolved past the colored people water fountain-era paranoid fantasies about armies of zombie stoners stumbling down Main Street, and if you accept that millions of people are already smoking it nationwide, you will basically see this ballot question as a vote on whether marijuana should be regulated and taxed.

- If legalization is batted down, don't goof on your local stoner too hard. The general effects he will suffer include "Not being able to buy it in a store" and "Not being able to grow it at home," moves that will feed the black market that awaits the stoner if his legal persecution is voted for. The modus operandi of the stoner will just continue as it was... untaxed, unregulated and persecuted by a costly legal system.

- Just don't complain to the stoner when the information presented in your daughter's aging History books cuts off at the Nancy Reagan era, or when a cop gets shot in a town which couldn't afford to properly armor him. We were offering tax dollars to pay for those things, but you chose to Just Say No.

- The stoners are tired of persecution, and they number in the hundreds of thousands in Massachusetts. They aren't going anywhere, no matter how you vote. The police have better things to do, as do the courts. The towns and state need the tax revenue. You're choosing between legal, regulated, taxed marijuana on one side and our police fighting a losing battle against both the black market and hundreds of thousands of harmless citizens on the other side. Get off of Mary Warner's back.

It's time to evolve, my friends. Stop the persecution of harmless marijuana smokers. We urge you to vote for the legalization of marijuana in Massachusetts.