February is the month when we reflect on Black History; we celebrate both the physical and metaphysical hearts; with spring break closing in the condom companies begin their public service to encourage those hedonist college hipsters to wrap that rascal.

February is also WEED month; POT month. It is my opinion that we really don't need a whole month to consider Marijuana.  The stoners over at NORML consider marijuana every day at 4:20.  The research on Marijuana is based on smoking habits akin to cigarette smoking and so, like cigar smokers who inhale, pot smokers who smoke at the frequency used in these terror statistics, are in the minority.  What has always bothered me about the prohibition on pot is that when something is outlawed the law can not touch it.  We have not made a dent in the drug war on pot in thirty years.

I can speak with authority on the pot war as I was a participant.  I was very in to retiring smugglers.  I was on the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Sagebrush when we arrived in Jacksonville with a prize ship named the Heidi.  In every compartment on the Heidi there was pot and after the GSA and Customs and the DEA got finished keeping each other honest, the published weight of the content was 137 tons.  That is the record for marijuana on the east coast of the USA.  The reason the record haul was way back in 1979 is that there is no reason to import bulk marijuana anymore.  North eastern Kentucky is to pot what the Napa valley is to wine.  Mexico imports truck loads of pot into the States – a benefit of NAFTA.

Most of the best pot on earth comes form the USA.  I know there are those who have toured the Middle East and were in Vietnam who will challenge me but I must say that great pot is grown in every state by the best science known to the world; and it is much stronger than even the legendary pot from Vietnam and Cambodia back during the war.  The coveted Colombian Gold of the early to mid ‘70s is rat-pot compared to the stuff being raised in grow-houses in quiet neighborhoods.  Now with so much surplus property sitting empty, grow houses are springing up with the added advantage of ganging their power demand among four vacant houses on a block and delivering the power to one address.  This makes it tougher to look for power spikes as evidence of a grow-house operation.

But the point of my reflection on pot is not to talk about the Yankee ingenuity used by pot heads to further their buzz lust; it is to consider how much money we have spent to irritate a market that could, if managed properly, deliver heavy taxes to the National Debt.  The subterranean economy of pot is expansive.  I debated this issue with the late Governor Lawton He-Coon Chiles as he was insistent that pot is an advent drug.  That is to say that people who shoot crystal methamphetamine were encouraged to it by hippies at Grateful Dead concerts who were selling balloons of nitrous oxide and joints (The interview was a long time ago).

We have spent a butt load of money on keeping pot out of the USA when it is in the USA that most of it is being produced.  We have spent money on something that should be protected under the first amendment like any other thing that might impress the Darwin theory into play.  Willie Nelson is the poster child for NORML.  He is old.  He is real old.  He's still here, that's all I'm saying.

I don't think pot is good for a person but if we are so bent on being free that tobacco and alcohol are legal we should consider the profit in it, and stop considering the loss.  So what if your kid smokes pot?  Mine kid doesn't so why should I be deprived of the tax profit as a result of your poor parenting?

Just some thoughts on Pot since, it's February and all.

KCO'D

This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2009.