Monday, March 16, 2009

The Financial Crisis Just Might Lead to Legal Pot By Marcelo Ballve, New America Media. Posted March 13, 2009.

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The Financial Crisis Just Might Lead to Legal Pot

By Marcelo Ballve, New America Media. Posted March 13, 2009.


NEW YORK -- In 1977, President Jimmy Carter asked Congress to decriminalize marijuana possession (it never did). The next year, the Ladies Home Journal described a summer jazz festival on the White House's South Lawn where "a haze of marijuana smoke hung heavy under the low-bending branches of a magnolia tree."

The late 1970's may have been the high-water mark for permissiveness regarding marijuana. But advocates of decriminalized pot believe a confluence of factors, especially the country's economic malaise, are leading to another countrywide reappraisal of the drug.

"There is momentum of the sort I haven't seen since I've been involved in this," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, which supports easing marijuana laws.

SOURCE: ALTERNET

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