Pubdate: Sun, 25 Oct 2009
Source: Belleville News-Democrat (IL)
Copyright: 2009 Belleville News-Democrat
Contact:  http://www.bnd.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1185
Author: Ray Hollmann

LIFT THE DRUG PROHIBITION

In 1939 when I was in fourth grade, I would bring a half-pint whiskey
bottle to school filled with chocolate milk to have at lunch. My
teacher, a ministerial student in our parochial school, showed me the
liquor tax tag and told me it was against the law to reuse that
bottle. My dad reassured me the teacher was wrong because no alcohol
was in the bottle.

However, seven years earlier, even having whiskey in that bottle was
illegal. But in 1933, the Prohibition experiment ended and alcohol was
decriminalized. And now it seems that it may be time to decriminalize
marijuana.

Medical use of marijuana has already been accepted in California.
Conservative guru William F. Buckley Jr. was in favor of its
decriminalization. U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, of conservative Virginia, has
proposed a bipartisan commission on criminal justice reform to
consider ending the war on drugs to alleviate the crowded conditions
in our prisons. That would include decriminalizing marijuana.

So maybe by the 2030s there will be marijuana packages on the shelf
with tax tags similar to the tax tag on my whiskey bottle filled with
chocolate mike in the 1930s.

Ray Hollmann

Fairview Heights
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake