A Mellow Proposal

The Supreme Court today cleared the way for the Federal Government to keep locking up people who use marijuana for medicinal purposes. Thus will the government continue to lock up glaucoma sufferers and AIDS patients, and also, we must admit, the thousands of people who just like to spend time with Mary Jane and who use medical marijuana laws as an excuse.

Now, we at the Blasphemy Blog do not smoke the wacky tabacky, seeing as how we are already quite capable in the snacking, mellowing out, and daydreaming-about-vaguely-profound-ideas departments. However, we really do wish the government would get off of this prohibition thing.

Instead, we wish the government would make methamphetamine into public enemy number one. In meth we have a drug that is undoubtedly addictive, universally destructive, and hundreds of times more dangerous than the doobies. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why meth is more dangerous; marijuana plants grow right out of the ground, whereas meth is made of fertilizer and battery acid. Meth has to be cooked up in highly flammable labs, whereas marijuana is just a cigarette that people eat when they're done. One of these things is not like the other.

We freely admit: meth scares the bejeezus out of us. This is a drug that does everything to you for real that they used to say marijuana would do to you. Out-of-control sexual urges, check. Permanent brain damage, check. Multigenerational communities of futureless addicts, check.

Meth is the drug of choice among the economically depressed rural poor, but it is also popular with truckers, machinists, and many others in professions that require you to work really hard for hours at a time. This is another reason we don’t like it: we’re suspicious of any drug that would make anyone want to work harder. Paranoid libertarians that we are, we’re afraid that the government is going to start making meth mandatory some day, so as to keep the workforce manically productive at all times.

So we freely admit our bias in favor of herb, grass, or whatever the kids call it; we at the Blasphemy Blog want everyone to be as mellow as us. But would it be too cute of a modest proposal to suggest that we decriminalize marijuana with an eye toward substituting it for meth? Meth is dirt cheap, but we bet that, if the government let those little leafy plants grow, marijuana would be even cheaper.

We would all prefer to have everyone walking around altered by nothing more than coffee, so that we could have normal conversations with everyone we meet, but it’s not going to happen. Given the choice, we’ll take a country of potheads over a country of tweekers any day.