Medical marijuana, huh? Hoo! Talk about a touchy subject!
The green stuff is less controversial today than it’s been in years past, considering that it’s been decriminalized in several states—even for recreational use alone!—and is kinda sorta allowed in certain situations in California, as long as the right person is looking the wrong way and you have a certificate from a doctor who verified your need for a dose every now and again.
Actually, I don’t know if anything I said in that last paragraph about society’s acceptance of marijuana is true. I mean, people used to sell soda with cocaine in it. Nobody got around to banning it in the United States until 1914, which in my mind is a time when women went swimming in ankle-length dresses with sleeves so as not to show off too much skin. I could be mixing up that time in America with Victorian Era England, but I’ll be the first to admit that history isn’t my strongest suit, three-piece or otherwise.
That was a bit of fashion humor there, because men used to frequently wear three-piece suits to the seashore when it came their time to bathe in the ocean.
My point is that we like to think of the past as this repressed time when everyone was tip-toeing around and whispering, afraid to say or do anything that could remotely be construed as inappropriate. I’m surprised the term “poppycock!” survived intact.
Regardless of which decade boasted the most prudish people, however, we are where we are today, which is in a field of seemingly perpetual limbo, caught between a more permissive state and a more restrictive federal government. From what I’ve read over the years, law enforcement agents tend to take their cues from whichever way the local wind is blowing, be it let-it-slide breezes or crack-down gusts.
This is on my mind because some people are trying to open a medical marijuana dispensary in Nipomo, where they’re facing a fair amount of opposition, mostly from folks who worry about the criminal element such an enterprise could theoretically attract or something.
At this point, I feel that an eventual across-the-board marijuana legalization is going to happen sooner or later. Why not make it sooner? Tax it, regulate it, and take the criminal aspect out of the equation. To be fair, I went to research some counterpoints to this position, and I began typing into the search engine Google, which—if you don’t know—will automatically fill in words and phrases as you type in an effort to anticipate your whim.
I had entered “arguments against mar,” when I noticed the terms that Google suggested I may be hunting for:
- • arguments against marriage
- • arguments against Marxism
- • arguments against marriage equality
- • arguments against Mars One
So wedded bliss in its theoretical variations, a revolutionary societal worldview, and the ongoing attempt to send humans to our nearest neighboring planet all rate higher as subjects that start with “mar” and generate opposition.
(By the way, before I got even as far as “mar,” Google suggested that I may be looking for arguments against net neutrality, the death penalty, eugenics, and climate change.)
Look, I’m not saying that I’m all for lighting up whenever and wherever you feel like it, but even the most staunch “just say no” repeater has to admit that the scale seems to be tipping toward easing up on something that a whole lot of people say makes their lives better by battling the pain.
The Canary cuts loose by getting an extra shot of espresso in the morning. Send comments or tips to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 9-16, 2015.