I am just disgusted by this Tommy Chong bong nonsense: not only is the War on Drugs - marijuana in particular - stupid, counterproductive, polarizing, wasteful, and just plain retarded, but the War on Drug Paraphernalia is even more removed from sanity.

How can it even be constitutional to arrest people and throw them in jail for manufacturing and selling glass and plastic objects? Besides the civil liberties affront, couldn't federal law enforcement be spending its limited time and resources on more important matters, like preventing Americans from being blown up? These assholes are going to make me hate government again.

Steve Chapman also thinks our marijuana laws are asinine:

Among American officeholders, there are two points of view about the drug war. Some are for it, while others are really, really for it. In Canada, though, Prime Minister Jean Chretien has said something no American politician would ever say: Marijuana users should no longer be treated like criminals.

....John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, expressed deep disappointment: "You expect your friends to stop the movement of poison to your neighborhood."

....U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci warned that decriminalization might force American customs agents to spend more time checking out Canadians entering the U.S.

....But decriminalization in Canada wouldn't have much effect on drug use in America. How do I know? Because decriminalization in America hasn't had much effect on drug use in America.

Yes, it has been tried here--and not, as you might expect, in just a few locales that are still stuck in the '60s. According to The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 12 states no longer make a habit of putting people in jail for smoking a joint, including such funky places as Nebraska and Mississippi.

What happens when a state decriminalizes marijuana? People immediately seize the opportunity to go on behaving exactly as they had behaved before. A 1999 study commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences found that marijuana use in states that relaxed their laws was no different from states that didn't.

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