There is no logical reason to punish people for marijuana.
These folks -
Colorado’s Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol - got the message right:
Regulate Marijuana
A new billboard unveiled Thursday by the group just blocks away from Mile High Stadium in Denver shows a smiling woman with her arms folded, next to the text: “For many reasons, I prefer… marijuana over alcohol. Does that make me a bad person? RegulateMarijuana.org.” The billboard and little more on the flip.
Bud Light - vs - Bud Right: which Bud is wiser?
Not only is the billboard near Mile High Stadium, it’s also right next to Mile High Liquors. The group said on its website that the location was optimal because it will force some drinkers to confront their bias toward marijuana users. It was also a good deal, too: the campaign told Raw Story that their sign only cost $5,000.
Brilliant, really.
Regulate does not have the same fear-inducing sound as "legalization" even though the two terms are essentially identical in overall meaning.
It has been a rare occasion, historically, that somebody could buy billboard space for this common-sense message at most any price. Colorado is, like California, insisting on pushing forward in the fight to fix America's backwards cannabis prohibition laws and the use of the term 'regulation' is the way to go.
They stick to the facts, which should be very well-known to MOST people at this point, but the ever-present onslaught of ONDCP 'anti-drug' propaganda (approximately several hundred million dollars/year), so while their $5000 billboard really is a milestone, it is absolutely dwarfed by the Federal marijuana propaganda budget.
From the article
Their claims aren’t just a clever pitch for the drug, either: Marijuana has in fact been shown to be less addictive than alcohol, and its more enthusiastic users tend to exhibit fewer adverse health effects than alcoholics. It is also impossible to overdose on marijuana, which its adherents see as an advantage over the relative ease of alcohol poisoning.
That’s the message the campaign is trying to bring to Coloradans, and Aldworth explained that they’ve only just begun. “We’re asking volunteers to talk to their neighbors, their family members — and particularly aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents, people in the next two generations up,” she said. “Young people, for the most part, get it, they’ve seen their friends use marijuana and alcohol, and how they affect people. They understand… There is no logical reason to punish people for marijuana.”
So again, I say that it's long past time for Democrats to be at least floating some version of this this message.
Some genuinely progressive ones already do: [1| 2| 3]
And, again, it is definitely time for Daily Kos to somehow make at least a monthly feature/focus, perhaps a Sunday feature once a month - something - to address this issue and to do SOMETHING to attract the vote the tens of millions of people who smoke marijuana from once a year to once a day.
The time really has come.