Growing up I heard a lot about the evils of cannabis.
The go-to warning was that of the "gateway drug."
Pot is against the law, and associating with it makes you a criminal. Start down that lawless path and your life as a decent citizen will come to an end. Your career and expertise will consist entirely of cocaine, heroin, crack, meth, or all of the above plus terror and murder. Your daily grind will be scoring the next fix at whatever cost. People, property, friends, family and society itself will be nothing to you but means-to-a-score. You'll spend your days sliding steadily downward into debauchery and sociopathy, and end them in a cage or a gutter.
Selling it, heaven forbid, means you are aiding and abetting that evil for profit. You are the root of it. In short, you are single-handedly causing the scourge of drugs and crime that is destroying our country. You are a pot-dealer. You are spawning criminals.
No validation.
No doubt.
That was the drug war gospel. Still is in many quarters; taken as matter-of-fact information by a very large number of people, and a lot of those are either in law enforcement or politics. Many will tell you, with no irony, that marijuana is bad because it's illegal, and illegal because it's bad. Utter nonsense, of course, but with an insidiously buried seed of truth.
Upon using cannabis, selling it, or even handling it, you were breaking the law. You'd been stamped a criminal, with a mark bearing the seal of the United States of America, and you knew that mark was there whether anybody else did or not. At best, when you knew it was nonsense, it was galling. However it could swiftly become all too feasible. A pair of cuffs, a court room and a cage left you with little doubt. You were a no good criminal. Unfit for society.
That doom, at least in part, will still fall on you if you're busted with weed, or [gasp] selling it, in most of the country.
But not in all of it. Sanity has come to the Rocky Mountain state. The people of Colorado have set out to lay bare the lies about cannabis. Relegalizing it in November 2012, retail cannabis shops officially opened on January 1, 2014. Americans are legally buying, selling and smoking cannabis in Colorado, this very day.
And the pot's only really dangerous side-effect is not manifesting. Instant criminals are no longer created by the use, growth or sale of the non-lethal, cheap-to-produce and increasingly ubiquitous cannabis plant. That side effect was neutralized, by way of the people of Colorado, and multitudes of criminals were pardoned in absentia.
At least according to Colorado state law.
That's one. And Washington, the Evergreen state, which also legalized cannabis in 2012 and is expected to open its own retail market in late spring 2014, is another.
48 to go.
11:05 AM PT: I edited the title following a good point by 714day in the comments. Original title read "over half a million criminals became citizens", and the word "citizens" as applied so broadly was not accurate. Folks busted with weed were still citizens, unless of course they had enough to make them felons.