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OK. I'll admit it. I've experimented with marijuana, and I did inhale.

I'm not a pothead or a frequent user. I've smoked pot enough times to figure out I don't like it. Like a lot of people, I'd giggle for a few minutes and get really hungry, but after that I couldn't help thinking that there were people in the bushes watching me.

Of course, I sometimes think that when I haven't been smoking pot.

The other thing I learned from the experience was that our laws are grossly out of proportion with any problems marijuana might create.

AL.com Opinion

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If it's a gateway drug, it's only because, when pushed underground, it has to travel on the same tracks as other illegal drugs. If you're a school kid, it can ruin your life – not because it will mass-murder your brain cells, but because we've made the law and school rules so draconian that youthful indiscretions can now irreparably wreck a kid's academic career.

Even later in life, a bad drug test could cost an otherwise productive person a job or land them in jail.

While it's something of a myth that our laws have packed our prisons with non-violent drug offenders, our courts are often a different story, and those courts and law officers' time is better spent on worse offenses.

The real reefer madness is apparent. Even if marijuana is bad for you, what we're doing isn't working.

"The obscure, we see eventually," Edward Murrow said. "The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer."

But public opinion seems to be turning. Last week, I asked our readers to participate in a survey. Seventy-eight percent of those readers who participated were either in favor of complete legalization. Another 10 percent were OK with medical marijuana.

Also, support was strong across party lines. Like Alabama's political landscape, about two-thirds of those readers said that, of the two major political parties, the GOP more closely represented their political beliefs. And a majority of them said they were for legalization.

That shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Alabamians don't like the nanny state, and what is that nanny's greatest whipping switch but prohibition?

It was not a scientific survey, but neither was it inconceivable that sentiment is moving that way. Last year a poll by Gallup, which was scientific, showed 58 percent of Americans favored legalization, a sharp 10-point swing from the year before.

That poll also shows a clear generational shift and a trend moving in favor of legalization.

Washington state and Colorado have legalized recreational use and neither state has yet gone up in smoke. Colorado has seen some new problems arise, particularly with edible marijuana, but it has also seen declines in violent and non-violent crime. (Also, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd had a bad high, too.)

United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies called this country a laboratory of democracy where states may "try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

It's not clear yet whether Washington or Colorado's experiments are succeeding. It's too early and there's not enough good data. But time will tell.

What is clear is that the War on Drugs experiment has failed, and it's time to try something else.

Unfortunately, the issue still hasn't been taken seriously in Montgomery. For that, someone will need to come up with some Goat Hill Green, or maybe some Backroom Smoke.

You know where I can get any?