Good God, I just read the stupidest fu**ing change.org legalization of marijuana petition, an especially unfortunate thing seeing as dumbness attached to the marijuana campaign is obviously bad news for its supporters. First of all, I can’t stand these mass e-mails wherein the messages say my name at the top, as if this person I don’t know is addressing me. It’s overbearing and condescending: I don’t need this false personalization.
Perhaps the worst part of it was that they misspelled “led” (“lead,” a mistake which up to now I’d only seen Donald Trump make), but by that time I was already miffed by the fact of their reasoning. Here’s what they do: they attempt to say that marijuana should be legal because the war on drugs didn’t work. Well if the problem is that the war on drugs didn’t work, what we should be doing is addressing the curtailing issues in the war on drugs, and working to hash them out so the whole thing runs more smoothly.
Now, of course, as anybody familiar with the issue knows, marijuana is a token which needs no manifested defense. It’s been known to kill cancer in lab rats as well as glaucoma, in people, and it’s not a drug on which the user can overdose — it’s psychotropic, rather than physioactive. The war on drugs has basically just been one big favor to the government, which profits from the prosecution of “criminals,” and to pharmaceutical companies, which profit from innocent victims of this charade coerced into taking their products. It might be that change.org gets the job done and we move forward with some much-needed legalization measures in this department, but I have a feeling the process would go faster if its facilitators were more mindful of its priorities.