Wonder what the Mormons think about this?

Well Baylen at D'Allliance beat me to this editorial, but I'm posting a link here anyway because it deserves wide distribution. Baylen notes the same paper in Utah published a piece supporting agricultural hemp last month.

This month the Utah Daily Herald takes on the war on some drugs with this editorial entitled, End the overkill for marijuana. I thought Utah was pretty conservative. Who would think a paper there would be taking such a sensible stance?

You don't swat flies with 16-pound sledge hammers. The hammer might kill the fly, but it will also do a lot of damage to the furniture. The so-called war on drugs involves similar overkill that needlessly, and expensively, puts people in prison for minor marijuana offenses.

It goes on to examine the problems with mandatory sentencing but I think it makes an even more important point about the classification of this herb.

At the root of overkill in drug sentencing is how marijuana is classified. As illicit drugs go, marijuana is innocuous...

Yet the legal classification of marijuana puts it on par with LSD, heroin and mescaline -- Schedule I drugs that are defined by statute as highly addictive and lacking any medicinal value.

But statutory definitions don't always reflect reality, and they certainly don't in the case of marijuana. The classification ignores the positive benefits of marijuana's active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which eases symptoms of glaucoma and enables cancer and AIDS patients to overcome nausea and regain their appetites.

By contrast, methamphetamine, which any Utah law enforcement officer will tell you is far more dangerous and damaging than marijuana -- both in its manufacturing and use -- is a Schedule II drug. Meth is in the same category as Lortab, Oxycontin and PCP, all of which have some medicinal value.

It also looks at unreasonable penalities for use of the plant.

The punishments clearly do not reflect the true effect of marijuana in society. It's just not particularly dangerous. While it has been argued that marijuana is a gateway to other more serious drugs, marijuana in and of itself appears less harmful than alcohol. Unlike the meth lab operator, a marijuana grower doesn't turn his home and yard into a toxic waste dump that requires a hazardous materials team to dismantle and decontaminate..

And unlike cannabis, meth is a truly dangerous and destructive drug. To quote an old anti-use campaign from the 60s when the drug was at least being made with pure industrially standardized precusors and being peddled under a different name - Speed kills.

Just one more illustration of how this war on some drugs is based on politics and prejudice rather than science and reason. Even worse, this exercise in congnitive dissonance is ruining civil society and costing you, the taxpayer, 40 billion dollars a year.