The politics of smoking pot

Normally I am not a political person, but I have been heavily invested in the local debates about pot legalization. There have been a series of town hall meetings, where the locals can speak in front of the city council and discuss their feelings on the subject. I have never spoken, but have listened with rapt attention as dozens of other locals have pleaded their case. Some of them are for it, and want a local dispensary to be approved, but most other people are firmly against cannabis, even though the state has legalized it for medical purposes. The strangest thing to me about this debate is how a plant like marijuana became so politicized. The religious people seem to be very much against the legalization of cannabis, and yet I don’t understand why. They believe that God created everything on earth, and if that is the case then God created cannabis, too. When religious people say cannabis is wrong, it sounds like they are saying God was wrong to create it, and that sounds weird to me. On the other side of the spectrum are the rabidly pro-cannabis advocates, who claim that the plant is the basis for their lifestyle. This seems just as strange to me as the religious folks, because why would so many people want to be high on cannabis all the time? People take whatever beliefs they already have, and they focus them on the cannabis plant. Meanwhile I am studying both sides of the cannabis debate and thinking to myself “relax, people, it’s just a plant.”

 

cannabis rules