The High Life

Colorado and Washington made worldwide news by making recreational marijuana legal - the first places to do so outside Uruguay, the Dutch city of Amsterdam, and a small semi-autonomous neighborhood called Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark. You might wonder how they can do this, as it's technically against federal law. Federal law overrides state law, and the government can come into either state and seize any and all marijuana, but the punishments pot smokers will receive would be minimal. The fact of the matter is that they won't. More and more people (the government officials included) are realizing anti-pot legislation and propaganda has done far more harm than good, and the even the president acknowledges that while alcohol and tobacco are legal and potentially fatal, marijuana has never killed anyone, has obvious medicinal benefits and is an antidepressant and a pain inhibitor. While it's also been decriminalized in many other places, it's still treated with Prohibition-era regulation even in many Western countries. Regardless, outlawing it doesn't prevent people from smoking it; in fact, it makes people want to smoke it more. Unfortunately, there are deluded people out there who want to treat it the same way as fatal substances like heroin and cocaine.

Nevertheless, attitudes towards it are softening, and in more liberal areas police never charge anyone who possesses it, and have even been found smoking it themselves while off duty. I tried it once, and never will again. The smell is atrocious and impossible to adapt to. I've been drunk a few times, but never high. It'll probably stay that way. Being high supposedly makes you slow, calm, silly, and able to laugh at everything. I'm already like that when I'm drunk.

Or so I'm told.

So if pot is your thing, live it up like it's 1969 and lose yourself in psychedelic phosphenes.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LukIJ…