About this time last year, we ran two pieces about legalizing marijuana. Neal Dewing made the the moral case for legalization while Skyler Mann did the same on the fiscal side of the issue.
Cases can be made citing facts and figures as well as making the case based upon individual responsibility, but in the end, nothing moves people more or can do more to convince another than stories that exist about real life people.
Michelle Malkin, in a touching piece in National Review, makes the personal case:
This brings us back to Pueblo. For the past three months, my mother-in-law, Carole, whom I love with all my heart, has battled metastatic melanoma. After a harrowing week of hospitalization and radiation, she’s at home now. A miraculous new combination of oral cancer drugs seems to have helped enormously with pain and possibly contained the disease’s spread. But Carole’s loss of appetite and nausea persist.
A month ago, with encouragement from all of her doctors here in Colorado, she applied for a state-issued medical-marijuana card. It still hasn’t come through. As a clerk at Marisol Therapeutics told us, there’s a huge backlog. But thanks to Amendment 64, the marijuana drug-legalization act approved by voters in 2012, we were able to legally and safely circumvent the bureaucratic holdup. “A lot of people are in your same situation,” the pot-shop staffer told us. “We see it all the time, and we’re glad we can help.”
Our stash included ten pre-rolled joints, a “vape pen,” and two containers of cheddar-cheese-flavored marijuana crackers (they were out of brownies). So far, just one cracker a day is yielding health benefits. Carole is eating better than she has in three months. For us, there’s no greater joy than sharing the simple pleasure of gathering in the kitchen for a meal, with Grandma Carole at the head of the table.
It’s this kind of example that will get people, particularly politicians, to move. I suspect the reason why a lot of politicians are so afraid to step across that line with respect to marijuana, is that it still carries the stigma of being something only the stoner, Jeff Spicoli types want and which nobody actually needs.
Clearly, that’s not the case.