Four and Score

Four-twenty, a slang term for smoking intoxicating forms of cannibis, a/k/a marijuana, comes to us, urban etymologists tell us, from a group of California high school stoners who met at that time in an appointed place to partake of the outlawed hemp. CBS even commissioned a poll just for the occasion:

Support for marijuana legalization at all-time high
CBS News

— Sixty-one percent of Americans think marijuana use should be legal, a five-point increase from last year and the highest percentage ever recorded in this poll. Eighty-eight percent favor medical marijuana use. Seventy-one percent oppose the federal government’s efforts to stop marijuana sales and its use in states that have legalized it, including opposition from most Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

This is notable because hoary old CBS News is essentially seeking the “pro” audience in commissioning this poll for the underground holiday of 4/20, as in April 20, based on Jeff Spicoli’s high school rendezvous to get communally baked.

Arguably, this is not the outcome that a Pepsi Generation of New Prohibition spent countless lives, dollars and prison sentences over. A long way from someone in Texas getting seventy years in penitentiary for a single marijuana seed.

But we are in limbo. The “states rights/small government” Republicans are trying to figure out what to do when, legally, marijuana is a Schedule I dangerous narcotic –along with heroin and an astonishing crapload of specific substances, (SEE HERE). Cocaine, by comparison, is a Schedule II drug, Anabolic steroids are Schedule III, and Clearasil™ is doubtless Schedule IV.

Twenty nine states have legal and/or medical marijuana laws, but Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, is ‘agin it.

(I still can’t quite wrap my brain around the fact that marijuana is now perfectly legal in my own state.)

Congress still makes it illegal for “drug money” to have bank accounts, and therefore all business has to be conducted in cash. A life-threatening proposition for businesses that have to keep large amounts of cash on premises. And impossible to “do business” with lines of credit, etc. etc. etc.  States rights versus “big government” with the Republicans on the “big government” side?  At present: limbo.

One gets the sense that this Administration is hell-bent on turning the clock back to the 1950s, but time will tell.

Either way, it’s post-four-twenty in four of the four “lower 48” states’ time zones.

And Americans are getting baked … from sea to shining sea.

It is what it is.

Courage.