Forum: 'America's Best Idea' meets one of worst
The Ken Burns series "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" got me thinking about one of America's worst ideas, the war on drugs. Particularly ill-conceived is the crusade against marijuana.
That bad idea is now threatening the good idea, as Mexican drug cartels - hampered by a tighter border - swarm over large swaths of U.S. public land to grow pot. There they dump toxic chemicals, dam streams, clear natural vegetation and leave piles of trash. Marijuana growers building a campfire set off the recent La Brea fire, which scorched 90,000 acres of California's Santa Barbara County.
Businesses serving tourists warn visitors against armed drug gangs protecting their crops. Last June, for example, hikers in southwest Idaho came upon a marijuana operation with a street value of more than $6 million.
Pot farms have been found in, among other places, Redwood National Park in California, North Cascades National Park in Washington state and Pike National Forest in Colorado. An operation in Sequoia National Park was discovered just a half-mile from a cave popular with tourists.
Federal and state governments spend $8 billion a year enforcing the ban on marijuana - and they can't even keep the cartels out of Yosemite. The National Park Service, meanwhile, frets about diverting its limited resources from ranger tours to stopping the marijuana growers.
And what purpose does all this spending serve? A new Gallup poll shows that nearly half of all Americans want to legalize marijuana and tax it like alcohol or tobacco. And solid majorities favor permitting medical marijuana, which now is legal in 14 states.
And so the Obama administration's decision to ease up on medical marijuana is not so much leading public opinion toward more enlightened drug policy as following it. Under the new policy, federal agents will not bother users or sellers operating under their state medical marijuana laws.
But while model conservat
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