Waste Management

There is no flotsam (or, for that matter, jetsam) in the photograph! (Feb. 26-March 4). In a nutshell, f&j are from vessels (floated off or jettisoned), and everything in the photo is natural.

What is shown is detritus.

In The Weeds

In 2004 I was at a wild party in Carmel Valley when I recognized a guy with his girlfriend, a dude who was at the time (and might still be) a Monterey County Deputy Sheriff. He was smoking weed and having a laughing good time. I tried to ignore the blatant hypocrisy until finally I walked over to the guy and said, “You’re a deputy sheriff, aren’t you? You know, dude, you bust people for exactly what you’re doing right now. How do you justify your hypocrisy?” He grinned an arrogant grin and replied, “Rank has its privilege.”

The real crime surrounding pot usage is how the legal bureaucracy victimizes citizens by turning them into criminals for imbibing in a substance far less harmful in every way than alcohol and nicotine. Tens of thousands of people are destroyed every year by alcohol usage in automobile accidents caused by drunk drivers or alcohol-related diseases.

Alcoholics abuse their families, inflicting serious emotional scars on others. Nicotine from cigarettes, cigars, chewing and pipetobacco causes hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.

If the same legal standards that keep marijuana illegal in America were applied to alcohol and tobacco, both would have to be criminalized. Yet the hypocrites who comprise the legal bureaucracy in America allow alcohol and tobacco to remain legal because many of them imbibe in both and because the system rakes in billions of dollars in taxes on the two. Keeping pot illegal keeps the jails full, which allows the legal bureaucracy to extort money from the citizenry. It’s called job security!

I am not calling for the criminalization of alcohol and tobacco. When self-righteous zealots brought about the era called Prohibition, that gave rise to organized crime in America. Well, the present-day wave of violent crimes sweeping America revolves mostly around the prohibition of marijuana.

When is the clueless and self-righteous legal bureaucracy going to wake up and realize it’s time to decriminalize marijuana? Can’t these fools see that by making weed legal and taxing the holy hell out of it, gigantic sums of revenue can be generated?