Denver – Good afternoon, everybody! I hope you had a great weekend. On Saturday I was staaaaaarving, so I went to eat at an Italian restaurant and ordered a plate of spaghetti and meatballs from a hot, blonde waitress. And when my order arrived with two, large meatballs that sat at the side of the plate and a thick, long breadstick nestled in between – and pointing at her – I told the waitress, “Wow! I think I am excited!”

And then she laughed. And I laughed. And then together, we laughed.

GOOD TIMES! GREAT VIBRATIONS!

HaHa!

Crumple up the kush, let’s paint this picture purple
And shawty watch out how you be hittin’ that, that shit’ll hurt you
We gotta puff, puff pass, the blunt must last
I put in my half, so don’t touch my grass
The weed man love me, he don’t never charge me
I shot the sheriff, like the legend Bob Marley
Lighters in the air, I brought enough to share
I gotta question for ya, who the tightest up in here?

wORd!

Anyway .. today, I want to talk about the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs failed. We lost. We tanked. We screwed up.

We should have been puff, puff, pass’ing instead of locking people away because former President Richard Nixon was an always-angry Republican like Sarah Palin, because cokeheads like to do armed robberies, and because meth freaks like to grind their teeth repeatedly until they look like drunken zombies.

I mean, once upon a time, the United States had Prohibition to outlaw alcohol, and look what happened: lots of people killed or got killed, or went to prison or got killed in prison. Or turned into people like Amy Winehouse.

I digress!

Most marijuana smokers, on the other hand, do not do stupid things like what alcohol drinkers do. I mean, go to a bar and see what happens by the time the bar closes: people love each other through slurred means, and quite often by the time the parking lot is full of drunken bodies heading home, there is invariably a fisticuffs fight involving more drunk people (and I’d know – I used to be one of them).

And! Plus! The difference between winos and pot-smokers on the street is the fact that you will never see a pot-smoker ask for money like a wino. Instead, you are more likely to see the pot-head playing music on a sidewalk – and sometimes people donate money without anyone asking.

Marijuana gets a bad rap. I mean, about the worst thing that could happen to someone if they smoked (or ate) too much THC is that they might get paranoid or deaf people might ask each other things like, “Shhh! Did you hear that?! My heart! Can you hear it, too?!” But even then, Republicans are already paranoid and they don’t even like drugs of any kind – except anti-anxiety pills and Viagra – and look what happened during the 2008 Presidential Election: Sarah Palin.

I digress!

And generally, when fanatics of alcohol like to procreate, they do irresponsibly and cause Ann Coulter to blame all single-mothers in the United States for the ongoing economic recession. Responsible stoners know that marijuana enhances sex more than alcohol and do not have to deal with “The Morning After” fusses (hangovers, regretful fornification, etc.) that accompany typical, alcohol-driven one night stands that took place during former President George W. Bush’s two terms.

Hot chicks + weed = sheer ecstasy, proved federal employees of the Department of Interior.

I digress!

And while moonshiners created NASCAR, the non-THC version of marijuana, hemp, has been cultivated for thousands of years, with uses ranging from making ropes to creating canvas’ themselves (the word, “canvas” is derived from Cannabis), to providing a nutritional source of food – hemp is also a vegetable. Even biodegradable fuels and a host of commercial products have been developed using hemp.

And unfortunately, too many people are being locked into prisons because of the War on Drugs. I mean, a cokehead in prison most likely will not receive any form of drug treatment, and instead of becoming a rehabilitated, former drug user, the cokehead will most likely find their way back into the prison system, one way or another. People who only smoke marijuana do not typically end up in prison; research has indicated that responsible pot smokers are that – responsible.

The War on Drugs is not helping anyone, least of all American society, and is wasting billions upon billions of taxpayers’ money on only “punishing” people by locking them into prisons instead of providing drug treatment and rehabilitation  (many mental health-care professionals also note that the mentally ill are routinely locked into prisons without adequate treatment).

So, in general, marijuana has, at the very least, more pros than cons, and I am of the opinion that marijuana (medical or not) is a far safer alternative than alcohol, for example. People die from alcohol withdrawals. People do not die from marijuana withdrawals.

Aigh’t?

There is an organization, though, that is trying to help redefine and reform America’s approach to drug enforcement and regulation – the Drug Policy Alliance. In fact, I will donate $4.20 to them later tonight because I want to see the War on Drugs ended, and I hope you do the same because our prisons are overcrowded and and current policies only make drug problems worse.

Anyway, I have to go now – I want to pick up the latest edition of High Times magazine before I head to Boulder, Colorado to join students at the University of Colorado as they “Light Up” today – but the point of today’s article is that today is a special day for those who appreciate marijuana and hemp. And before I go, I want to remind of you one last thing:

Never fuck up the rotation.

Be good .. or be good at it.

Paotie