Ha ha.

You have to be smoking a lot of weed to ever think the United States government will ever do the right thing or do ever do the intelligent thing.

Those scumbags are making billions of dollars off of shitting on the constitution and arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning people who are engaging in the "economic" crime of "harming" the makers of happy pills by not purchasing their toxic pills.

The last three presidents smoked weed. Put them in jail.

I don't know of any cop that gives a shit that you smoke pot. If your looking to make it legal to walk down the street sucking on a bong, you can forget about that. In most places you can't drink in public, be drunk in public or drive drunk so what are you protesting for the right to do? Sit in your home and get high like an alcohol drinker. You can pretty much do that now. Forget about it.

It's about time to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana in the same way as alcohol (a much more harmful drug). Please do the right thing politicians. The alternative is more of the same - arrests, jail, children taken away, expelled from schools, dogs and people killed, money wasted. etc. People will still smoke pot either way, but can we do it in peace? Please?

I don't think you've thought this through. Take a few minutes and try again.

Maybe I'm the only one here old enough to remember that coinage, designed, I suppose, to mislead parental units and dorm monitors about what refreshments were actually being served at those college parties. Still, "tea bagging" day is an excellent time to revive that nostalgic old usage.

that many of the people who think pot is "immoral" are also NRA dead enders who have no problem with letting any psycho who wants one own a gun. Nice double standard we got in this country. I wonder whose vice gets more people killed.

So cops don't care about weed? I have to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of people arrested each year for simple possession get caught then.

I work at the DA in a major urban area and I guarantee you that no matter what their personal belief about marijuana is, when they're on the job cops definitely care about weed.

I don't know any advocate of marijuana decriminalization who wants to legalize "sucking on a bong" in public. The problem is that people do get arrested for weed when all they want to do is smoke it in private, like Kickstarts so blithely assumes they can do with impunity.

where I'm from.

i had the same thought when i saw the article...thanks for the memories! now where did i put my rolling papers...

I heartily endorse this. But you DO realize that as soon as weed is legal and taxed up the ass, it will be banned in all of the same places that cigarettes are today.

I live in NYC, and boy there sure is a TON of weed-smoking in this town. For serious.

That said, the notion that people don't get in trouble for it is horribly misguided.

In fact, just about six months ago, I read interviews with a half-dozen public defenders about the large numbers of small-scale possession busts that occur here on a daily basis.

The best part of the story is this: it's almost exclusively brown people who get busted, and there's a simple routine to it all.

Let's say it's 2am and a group of people are waiting at a bus stop (it's common for food-service workers to end shifts pretty late). It is a standard practice for cops to roll up to the stop, get out, and ask everyone what they're doing, especially if these folks are largely black or Latin in a predominantly "white" neighborhood.

Once a cop starts "interviewing," the next step is the simple pat-down for weapons. This is a "search," but it's not treated as such by the law, because the notion is that cops have every right to protect themselves from the possibility that a citizen might be carrying a weapon. So far, so good.

During the pat-down, cops usually ask the citizens if they have anything "on them." This is a euphemism for contraband, and most citizens who are routinely questioned police know it. The cop also typically promises, "Just tell me the truth and we won't have a problem."

Unfortunately, some folks are still naive enough to believe this, and occasionally they will ADMIT to carrying a joint, or a quarter-ounce of weed, or a hash-pipe, just because they know the cop is going to find it anyway.

At that point, the cop will arrest the citizen, confiscate his weed/pipe/joint, and ship him to Riker's.

This happens ALL THE TIME. This is not a service to society--it's just a racist assault on your countrymen.

If you live in the suburbs or something and can't believe such things happen, I'd recommend spending some time in Bed-Stuy or the South Bronx or Washington Heights.

There's no substitute for seeing this stuff in real-life.

When weed is legal and taxed to the heavens and pot smokers complain they're being singled out for 'sin taxes'.

Ha ha. Very funny. Look at the silly stoners and their desire to pay taxes instead of getting arrested and thrown in jail.

Actually, it's not funny at all. It's dead serious to those of us who have had their lives ruined due to the misguided war on pot. However, we still have to content with the idiotic mindset of people who only seek to ridicule us.

Can we drop the tired munchie jokes for five minutes and consider all that is lost and all that can be gained with a smarter policy?

Pot smokers

Carl Sagan: pretty smart

Michael Phelps: fastest man in water

Usain Bolt: fastest man on earth

Can we finally put to rest the stereotype of the lazy, unmotivated stoner? I know doctors, lawyers, politicians and businessmen (even salon.com writers) who all smoke pot daily.

Please let us consume our cannabis in peace. Tax it, regulate it and make it uncool. I don't care, just do something. The current policy isn't working and we are going to continue smoking pot, even if you give it the death penalty.

Pot prohibition will end. Bank on it. Until then, more misery for us and more joke fodder for you.