Part of this is we've been lucky to have a lot of mainstream spotlight lately. Weed has been represented recently under the lights of reality television, former LEO's, an almost never-ending amount of documentaries, and in general debates over state's laws including discussions spurned by politicians. Amid all the news headlines about "Trayvon this" or "plane crash that," you'll occasionally see a decent reference of a different official calling for a new look on marijuana. These little blips in the radar floating downstream are great, the fact these blips are 90% nonviolent is likewise, great success. Even my parents got news of the Oakland raids, by which our government further disgusted them by infringing on the state of California's decision, (go mom and dad!)
People fundamentally have a clue that there is a large enough gap between recreational soft drugs and addictive hard ones - but personal money is deeply entrenched with a law enforcement/private prison system that benefit from the arrests of "us". Nearly a million yearly jailed for pot and plenty serving longer terms in prison. My perspective has always been that law enforcement should reallocate their efforts to reflect the social damage of a drug - treating crack, meth and heroine as more critical targets than marijuana.
We as a society have a collective idea that marijuana use is much less dangerous than even the legal drugs we are allowed access to on a day-to-day basis, but dozens of decades after the hate brewed for MJ has died, the profit other systems have achieved from the illegalized MJ is alive and well. This is a tough problem to deal with.
Competing drugs as well, you can bet everyone from the Marlboro man, Rx companies, to Budweiser don't want to see profits suffer from a new 'allowed' substance coming on the scene.
Sorry for the tangent, but these are dividing, polarizing factors. My favorite part of that quick read though, was this, "So conclude more than 300 economists who say that the government -- if it got out of the business of enforcing marijuana laws -- could save a whopping $7.7 billion annually."
The biggest question on my head however, is will we be able to hurdle all the public misconceptions? I feel we are too hungry as a nation to remain, "the best and biggest superpower," - ensuring this could mean we continue to limit access to drugs which could have a-motivational effects. Cannabis is not for all people, but we should have the choice.
I ran the numbers for legalization a while back, and they don't look good for the legalization crowd.
Why?
Because the feds make more money off prohibition than they would off taxing it if it were legal. Just look at what the feds make off taxing cigarettes, and do some rough calculations as to how much weed Americans consume, and you'll see I'm right. The feds' revenues off of legal pot wouldn't come close to what they squeeze out of the taxpayers now for prohibition. Which is why the feds aren't going to back off of California - if they backed off of Cali, it would be open season and all the other states would legalize so Cali couldn't corner the market, which would amount to de facto legalization. Not that this is all about the feds - the states make get fat checks for prohibition too.
