I don't smoke pot.  I have -- as almost everyone I know who's my age has -- but I never particularly liked it.  It didn't make me want to "take my pants off over my head" (the effect it had on Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall); I just didn't like the way it made me feel: paranoid, panicky, etc.  I smoked some pot with a friend once and had a really awesome cab ride downtown to my place because the street lights and traffic lights and other people's headlights and taillights looked really, really, really cool as we slid down Second Avenue, but that's the only memorably good experience I ever had with pot.  I always preferred drinking.  (Of course, I don't do that anymore either.)

But I can't think of one good reason why this drug isn't legal.  Or rather, I can't think of one good reason why marijuana shouldn't be legal if drinking is legal.  And drinking is legal.

Two items in the news today made me think of this.  The first was the Drudge Report's predictably putrid "coverage" of the Obama administration's change in drug-enforcement policy regarding pot:

Since this is the Drudge Report, a photo of President Obama hanging out with some grade-schoolers accompanies the headline ("High Times: Obama to Issue New Marijuana Policy": Jesus Christ, Drudge).  (Btw, this is the first time I've ever seen Drudge use a green headline.  Because pot is green.  Get it?  Headlines on the Drudge Report are always either black or, for both important and "important" news, red.  Never green.  But you get it, right?  It's green because of the pot angle.  Because did I mention that green is the color of pot?  Oh: well, it is.  Do you get it now?  No?  What are you, high?)

The article links to an AP story about the administration's coming decision to step down prosecution of federal drug laws in cases where people are using (or selling) marijuana for medical purposes in ways which are legal in their state (fourteen states allow pot to be used for medicinal purposes).  "Prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law," the AP says.

This is a departure from the Bush administration's policy of pursuing medical-marijuana sellers and users who were adhering to state laws but were in violation of federal laws.  (Sort of funny to see conservative/libertarian Drudge on this side of a states-rights issue...  R.I.P William Safire, who, while I usually disagreed with him, espoused logically consistent opinions from column to column and from year to year.)

The second news item was this: Gallup's latest poll showing that forty-four percent of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana (across the board; not just for medicinal purposes).  I find that percentage sort of shocking; more shocking is that the number is up thirteen percentage points since 2000 (thirty-one percent were in favor then).  2000 was only nine years ago.  At this rate, Gallup notes, a majority of Americans could be in favor of legalization within four years.

Any why not?  Again: I will not be running down to Stoner Joe's Kind Buds should pot become legal.  I don't like pot.  (Maybe I was smoking the wrong kind; maybe I should have tried the kind the dude in American Beauty smoked, G-13, manufactured by the U.S. government: "completely mellow high, no paranoia"... Whatever.)  But I know this: it makes absolutely no sense for alcohol to be legal if pot isn't.

In fact, it makes less sense for drinking to be legal than for pot to be.  When was the last time you read about a fatal car accident caused by a driver being really stoned?  It must happen, but it doesn't happen very often.  (Not that I'd advocate driving while stoned.)  And when was the last time you read about someone ruining their liver with pot?  Yes, you can ruin your lungs with pot, just as you can with cigarettes, but two things: first, cigarettes are legal; second, when was the last time you read about someone dying of lung cancer caused by too much pot smoking?  (And no, "Bob Marley" is a wrong answer.)  What about domestic altercations caused by someone being super-high?  What about families being torn apart by a parent's pot use?  You don't hear about this type of stuff, do you?  Perhaps occasionally.  Not often.

Pot can make you a little out-of-it?  Permanently a little out-of-it?  Yeah, it can; so can drinking.

There's always the danger of smoking pot laced with PCP or similar though, right?  Well, first of all, how often does that happen?  Seriously.  Has that ever happened to anyone you know?  When was the last time you heard of such a thing happening?  After-school movies don't count.  Perhaps you have; if so, good news: legalized pot would be regulated just as alcohol and cigarettes are now.  Problem solved.  (Legalizing pot, of course, would also put tens or hundreds of thousands of drug dealers out of business; that'd be nice, wouldn't it?  Not to mention, money which now goes into their pockets would go instead into the pockets of legitimate small businesses and into state and federal tax coffers.)

And what about the fact that you can die from alcohol withdrawal, while marijuana withdrawal is mild if it occurs at all?  All I'm saying is, which is the more dangerous of these two drugs?  And before you answer that, remember that pot would be safer than it is now were it legal and therefore regulated.

Oh, a final point regarding my favorite: "marijuana is a gateway drug."  The idea being: you're more likely to move on to drugs such as cocaine, crack, heroin, jet fuel, enriched uranium, etc., if you've tried pot first.  As I understand it, the statistics on this are sort of sketchy.  But let's say that a cocaine addict is more likely to have smoked pot than a non-cocaine addict: is it possible that we're seeing a cause-and-effect relationship where there isn't one?  Just possible?

Plus, there's this: if pot is a gateway drug, then surely alcohol is one too.

And alcohol is legal.

Which is as it should be.  We tried outlawing it once.  The experiment was not a success.

President Obama and Presidents Bush and Clinton before him smoked pot; all three of them grew up to be the President Of the United States.  (Clinton "didn't inhale," for God's sake, making him either really stupid or super-lame, and I've never thought of Clinton as being stupid.  Bush, in taped conversations with his appropriately named friend Doug Wead in 1999, said, "I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried." And Obama is on record as having used both pot and coke.)

Not to mention that Alexander Hamilton and John Adams are known to have shared a few bowls while crafting the Second Amendment, with the pot supplied by none other than George Washington, although Washington is not thought to have been a pot-smoker himself.  (Sorry, that's not true.  Although it is true that Benjamin Franklin invented the bong.  (Also not true, sorry -- but he could have if he'd put his mind to it.  A "bong," by the way, is what we kids under sixty-five or so call "drug paraphernalia" which filters pot smoke through water which becomes increasingly foul-smelling the longer the bong is used without a water change; the foul-smelling water may then be poured from the bong onto the floor of a prep-school freshman's dorm room, making the room smell like rotting oregano for several days; that was my experience, anyway.))

We have more important issues to discuss here in the U.S. at the moment than whether marijuana should be legal.  But I'll be damned if I can think of one good reason why it shouldn't be.  I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been said many, many times before.  The difference, though, is that more and more Americans seem to agree.