Ordell tells Melanie that too much weed will sap her ambition. Melanie responds, “Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV.” Jackie Brown, 1997.
As a society, we’re in the process of accepting the obvious truth that pot is never going away and that impairing hundreds of thousands of lives with criminal prosecutions is cruel and wasteful. Decriminalization is a good thing.
What’s not a good thing is letting decriminalization blur into officially normalizing pot use by setting up a government-approved infrastructure for distribution so that we can tax it. Is there no middle ground between imprisoning people over something and giving that thing the government’s seal of approval?
Continue reading “Reefer Madness”
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More than ever before, our shared world is constructed of images. We talk a good game about facts but the connection between our collective memory and history as documented by journalists and historians is more tenuous than we ever imagine.
April 1975 when United States Navy sailors dumped helicopter after helicopter overboard to make room for the fleeing troops, and the embassy staff, protected by M16-wielding marines, evacuated the city as North Vietnamese Army (NVA) tanks rolled into town.
We’re only a little more than 1/3 of the way through the first term of the Trump presidency and it already bids fair to end the tenure of the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower.
