“How dare Coloradans ruin their bodies with weed on January 1st when they outta be home vomiting up all of last night’s booze, like God intended!” blasts Stephen Colbert as he lays waste to the hypocrisy of marijuana prohibition.

Colbert manhandles two opponents: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post. Both oppose legalization.

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Marijuana will not kill you, but a SWAT team surely will if they think you are in possession of it. Never in the history of man has anyone, ever, overdosed on marijuana. Even in studies involving lab animals that were given 100’s of times more marijuana than a human could possibly intake, did they die.

At any one time, 59,300 prisoners charged with or convicted of violating marijuana laws are behind bars. Of those, 17,000 are behind bars for possession ONLY, not trafficking. Enforcing marijuana laws costs an estimated $10-15 billion in direct costs alone. Not to mention the sustained costs of incarceration of the individual who has done nothing to harm anyone. It is estimated that the money spent enforcing useless marijuana laws is double what we spend on education in this country.

The prohibition of marijuana drives the black market for it. The laws that are in place to make it illegal actually CREATE CRIME by eliminating free market competition thereby creating an incentive for the unethical and monopolistic criminal distribution. It in essence creates a cartel for the ones willing to risk the cultivation. The exact same thing happened with the prohibition of alcohol in the early part of the 20th century. It allowed for organized crime to rise and prosper by supplying the demand for alcohol through underground transactions. The prohibition of alcohol was reversed and it was made legal again, so why hasn’t this happened with marijuana?

Marinol is a pharmaceutical chemical drug produced by Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc. It contains the exact molecular structure of the THC molecule and has the same effects of marijuana. However you cannot grow Marinol in your backyard. You cannot make obscene profits from the patent of a plant, because luckily, the state has not granted their mega –corporations the ability to patent nature, yet. The contradiction here is that you can make nature illegal, and then recreate nature in a lab using chemicals, put that illegal part of nature, available for profit, into a pill and make millions. Do you see the inconsistency here?

The hemp plant is quite possibly the most useful plant ever grown by mankind. There are literally hundreds of uses for the hemp plant ranging from paper to bio-fuel. The Declaration of Independence is written on hemp and is still in the same shape now as it was when the founders wrote on it over 200 years ago.

Hemp is the strongest natural fiber known to man. Hemp hurds, the woody stalk, can be made into paper, fuels, and even plastics and far cleaner and safer for the environment than petroleum. Hemp would stop deforestation, provide renewable fuel, provide clean plastics, and highly nutritional foods. However, in the United States, you can purchase, import, export, wear, eat, sell, and use hemp, but it is completely illegal to grow in all states, with the groundbreaking exception of Colorado. By the way industrialized hemp has no drug properties whatsoever, it CANNOT get you high. Does this make sense?

We must ask ourselves why.

Marijuana has been proven over and over again NOT to cause any damage to the brain, whatsoever. Never has anyone ever contracted lung cancer from marijuana smoking. It has benefits and uses that are enormously advantageous to mankind, from medicinal, to spiritual, to industrial, and it is ILLEGAL. We must ask ourselves why. Why, since the inception of the “war on drugs” has the prison system become privatized and increased almost 1000 percent? Why does this country have 5 percent of the world’s population, and 25 percent of the world’s prison population? Why is it legal for pharmaceutical companies to sell mind altering dangerous chemicals, yet we cannot grow a plant in our backyards? Why is it that cigarette related deaths top 400,000, pharmaceutical deaths top 100,000 annually, and they are completely legal, while marijuana has never ever killed anyone ever? Why?

More and more people are asking these questions and the results of such intrigue, Colorado and Washington State, are proving to be quite heartening. However, this is just the beginning. The ground breaking hemp crop planted in Colorado by farmer Ryan Loflin has the ability for unrestrained potential. Once the rest of the nation sees the myriad of benefits from this one 60 acre crop, more questions will be asked, more crops will be planted, and a peaceful and clean industrial revolution, will begin freeing humanity from the bondage of unsustainability.

Annual Causes of Death in the United States

Tobacco 435,000

Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity 365,000

Alcohol 85,000

Microbial Agents 75,000

Toxic Agents 55,000

Motor Vehicle Crashes 26,347

Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs 32,000

Suicide 30,622

Incidents Involving Firearms 29,000

Homicide 20,308

Sexual Behaviors 20,000

All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect 17,000

Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin 7,600

Marijuana 0