Americans don’t agree on much; not race – and within that conversation are the issues of white supremacy and the impacts of slavery. Americans don’t agree on politics, sexuality nor religion, yet marijuana usage emerges from the bickering as a common ground.
It hasn’t yet been leveraged as a unifying tool – and that may be to the fault of both political parties – but attitudes towards marijuana in the country have surely shifted from dark and grim, to jovial and just; for sure, its no longer uber popular to bestow upon one a criminal record for possessing small amounts of marijuana.
On Monday morning, responding to the questions from reporters about a marijuana raid by police over the weekend, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, who as City Councilman successfully decriminalized the plant, said Pennsylvania should follow Colorado’s step and pursue legalization as a way to avoid police and citizen contact, among other reasons.
Other reasons to bring marijuana out from the shadows of society are due to its health benefits, its ability to mitigate addiction to hard drugs, like an opioid, and the positive economic impact it can have on a locale.
Although the support nationwide for legalization isn’t tremendously high, more than 56 percent of Americans, according to a new Yahoo News and Marist University poll, view smoking marijuana as socially acceptable, and there are nearly as many marijuana smokers in the country as there are those who indulge in cigarettes.
And even if the country can’t unify around full blow legalization, all sides will likely resist regressive marijuana policies, like that which are expected to come from the White House, given the Attorney General in the Trump Administration thinks marijuana is only slightly less dangerous than heroin, despite 13,000 people in 2015 dying from heroin overdoses and no deaths ever linked to a marijuana overdose.
U.S. Attorney General Mr. Jeff Sessions, amidst a national movement to de-crowd prisons and reform the criminal justice system, wants to revamp the war on drugs, though he’s finding out that his stance has little public will behind it. On marijuana issues in particular, Mr. Sessions is a caveman attempting to make a wheel in a flying-car world. In other words, he’s behind the times; and, in fact, he’s resisting the times, and thus will soon come on the receiving end of the resistance.
If Mr. Sessions truly wants to wage a war on drugs, he will probably see untold enemies, from all sides of the aisle, preparing to fight back. On the issue of marijuana, it’s Mr. Sessions’ prerogative to pick a fight, but he’s very much outnumbered.
Thanks for reading. Until next time, I’m Flood the Drummer® & I’m Drumming for JUSTICE!™
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Photo courtesy of the author.
Christopher, Thanks for the article. I’m a clinician and historian. I wrote my first professional paper on drug use and abuse in 1973. There are some things we all need to know. First, mind-active drugs have been part of the human experience ever since humans emerged. Second, getting high isn’t just a human practice. Animals seek out plant drugs and get high themselves. Third, All societies have drugs that are used by the mainstream and drugs that are used by minorities. Fourth, when a mind-active drug becomes popular with the mainstream, the barriers to its use drop and the drug… Read more »