Getting off on getting off

A columnist for al-Reuters wrote about the American fetish for prohibition. No, not booze; we did that. Marijuana. 72 years now, it seems, since the stuff was banned: "It has created a huge underground industry catering to users, helped the U.S. prison population balloon into the world's largest, and diverted the resources of American law enforcement. What it has not done is keep Americans from using marijuana... In 2006, the last year for which figures from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are available, 830,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges, most of them for possession rather than trafficking... That works out at a marijuana arrest every 38 seconds. A study last year estimated the cost of these arrests at $10.7 billion... The Bush administration's drug czar, John Walters, will have none of this. He talks about marijuana in terms reminiscent of the apocalyptic warnings issued by Harry Anslinger, the first head of the Bureau of Narcotics in the 1930s and a driving force behind the 1937 marijuana prohibition. Anslinger deemed marijuana "an addictive drug which induces in its users insanity, criminality and death." Walters often takes issue with "the perception that marijuana is about fun and freedom. It isn't. It's about dependency, disease and dysfunction." Americans who have admitted smoking marijuana at one point or another but escaped dependency, disease and dysfunction include President George W. Bush, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator John Kerry, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Vice President Al Gore, and Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for next November's presidential election."

Rico says he once ate some loaded brownies, but that's the closest brush with marijuana he's had first-hand; almost all his friends growing up were pot smokers, however...