i doubt it’ll happen any time soon. i’ve almost lost faith in the concept of “pro­gress” in america. since the 60s, gov­ern­ment and the reli­gious right who drive it have lost touch with any sense of civil liber­ties, and right now, lots of you are still fighting for the same rights that many coun­tries have had for a while… it’s funny though, at the end of the day, pot leg­al­iz­a­tion is actu­ally one of the least important issues facing america right now. con­sid­ering the eco­nomy, health­care, gay rights, the envir­on­ment — hell, you guys are still dealing with race rela­tions. maybe that’s why pot’s even being talked about. leg­al­iz­a­tion isn’t such a polit­ical bal­an­cing act like all the other issues. cyn­icism aside, hope­fully this is not just a polit­ical play.

They say it is better to light a single candle than to curse the gov­ern­ment, so let’s focus this week on a small out­break of legis­lative sanity: New Jersey’s break­through vote on med­ical pot last night aside, there are now four states con­sid­ering bills calling for the full leg­al­iz­a­tion of marijuana.

With the torch of this important battle dip­ping so often into the insanity pool — Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion embraced then dis­missed it, while Barney Frank pushed new laws as cities cracked down on med­ical pot, and the num­bers still never added up — I called up the sponsor of the latest bill, a Wash­ington State con­gress­woman named Mary Lou Dickerson.

“I’ve felt for quite some time that we were wasting tax­payers’ money with the cur­rent policies,” she told me. “We really have a budget crisis here in Wash­ington, as do forty-​eight of the fifty states, so I decided it was time to take a stand and begin an honest con­ver­sa­tion about how we could better use the tax­payers’ money.”

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