I truly meant for this post to be up on 420 and then subsequently the days afterward, but in true stoner fashion I have waited til the end of the week to do it. So, many entities and institutions were paying homage to everyone's favorite lady in green – Miss Mary Jane. I performed on stage with the Utility Players and even had a guest spot on their podcast prior to their 2nd Annual 420 HOLIDAZE Show to discuss our first encounters with weed and our views on its decriminalization. I have provided the podcast episode below, you should all totally check it out.

It seems so ridiculous that we are still having conversations about marijuana. I hope that 20 or 30 years down the line we cringe at our naivety and our Shining-Time-Station attitude toward weed and its use. I have been a consistent pot smoker for about six years now. As with most individuals, I discovered weed in college and have never really turned back or in any way questioned my weed consumption.

Most of the rumors regarding weed are grossly untrue. Most of the pot smokers that I knew at my University also happened to be the ones that were running the school. They were involved in Greek life, the national guard, student government, and social justice and other inclusivity measures. They were the people with active social lives and often had to hold down multiple jobs in order to pay for the costs of higher education. In essence, in college all the stoners I knew were really intelligent, articulate, motivated individuals who just happened to really like smoking pot.

Now I understand, like any other substance, weed effects us all differently and our body responds to it differently, so I am by no means making a grand generalization about the effects of weed smoking on the body. However, I am stating there is a spectrum. Anti-drug lobbyists would like to paint the picture that pot smokers are lazy, apathetic, unmotivated individuals who, when they smoke, attain the intellectual capacity of dead moss growing on a log. I am sure there are individuals that the above statement might apply to, but over my six years of smoking pot most of the people that I have come across are by and large laid back & casual individuals who just like to toke up to relax.

Observing the behavior of drunk people over my lifetime frustrates me as to why weed is still not legal. Alcohol causes people to make stupid decisions, impairs judgments, destroys the body, and kills brain cells. Alcohol is often the root of car accidents, violence in bars, and domestic violence at home. I have seen college students drink so much that they black out, stumble around unaware of who they are or where they are – often bumping into people like me and spilling my drink – and at the end of the night have an intimate relationship with their toilet because their body is so sick of the poison that they put in it that it needs to throw it up. Funny, the most tragic or destructive thing I have seen a stoner do is have eater's remorse after ordering an extra large pizza with cheesy bread and downing it all with no assistance. I'm sure things have happened to people while being stoned, but how often do we hear about it.

I also had the privilege to study abroad in Amsterdam my last semester in college …. simmer and sit on that statement for a while ;) and it was the absolute best time of my life. Although my academic focus in the city centered on gender, sex, and sexuality I could not help but take in the weed culture present there and draw comparisons between my experience with weed in Amsterdam and of that in the United States. In Amsterdam all soft drugs are legal – hash, weed, and mushrooms – and are available for purchase in either coffee shops or head shops. These products are regulated and taxed. I was able to walk into an coffee shop and strike up a conversation with the owner about the different strands of marijuana, the type of high I should get, and any other information I wanted. Then you could chill out in the coffee shop, play some arcade games, get a fruit juice, and read.

I remember having a conversation with my host mother about drugs and the whole drug culture in Amsterdam. By in large, the people who smoke pot are tourists coming into the country with the sole purpose of smoking weed. When I asked her why – she pointed out that because it is illegal in other countries there exists this aura of mystery surrounding weed. She said it's exotic, hard to come by, and extremely expensive, but here in the Netherlands it is legal, sold everywhere, and relatively cheap. Similarly, this is the culture that these children grow up with and parents have conversations with their children about drugs and drug use. My host mother told me that she by no means is going to encourage her son to smoke weed or do other drugs but she is going to sit him down and have a conversation. She is going to give him all the facts and emphasize most importantly that if he is going to do it, to do it in a safe environment with people that he trusts.

Meanwhile our repressive society pretty much projectile vomits at the thought of legalizing pot. This is not true for everyone and there are even people who do not smoke weed but endorse the movement to legalize it. They see the millions of dollars this country is investing on the “war on drugs” and yet in the same hand see the decrease budgets that public school programs are working with. In the state of Nevada in 2007, the state government spent an average of $11,500 per inmate in matters related to weed and yet only spent a mere $4,500 on every child on their public education. Political pundits often use the rhetoric of the family and how important we need to invest in the FUTURE and the EDUCATION of our children and then we have figures like this, highlighting the hypocrisy. We would rather invest billions of dollars into a program that is largely ineffective – are we any closer to winning the war on drugs – instead of in music, arts, theater programs for our kids. We would rather spend the time and effort to catch random neighborhood weed dealer X than allow schools to purchase new textbooks, school supplies, and more. We would rather spend millions of dollars on prisons and incarcerating pot smokers/dealers than investing that money in college scholarship programs to provide free education to high school graduates. Why don't we just legalize it, tax the SHIT out of it, generate enough revenue off of it to I don't know FIX THE NATIONAL DEFICIT or perhaps get us out of this little economic recession I have heard so much about. But what do I know, I am just a little drag queen stoner ;)