After nearly a century of hysterical opposition to a plant named Mary Jane, based on nothing more than prejudiced protestant conviction that anything that makes people feel good must somehow be bad, those who should be leaders but usually act like lemmings, have finally been forced to acknowledge that Mr Cannabis might not actually be such an horrific bogeyman after all.

The war on drugs is over. The other side won. Even our very own do-nothing Dunne, dedicated only to remaining a government Minister for all of his natural life, now admits it was just a misfortunate misunderstanding. All those harmless people put in jail, all the ‘gateway drug’ prosecutions that showed hapless users the real gateways in prison, all the wasted police resources that could have gone to solving burglaries and other real crimes that actually do cause social harm, all the illegal profits feeding the gang cancer, all the truly damaging synthetic ‘legal high’ alternatives, all the sheer stupidity and waste and pointlessness of decades and decades of trying to poke a hole in water, discovering it doesn’t work, so spending even more time and effort and resources ever more frenetically doing the same useless thing over and over in the conviction that it surely will work the next time, which happens to be Einstein’s excellent definition of insanity, all of this and so much more, is one big fat f***ing (god I wish I could use that word) failure.  Well done, gutless politicians. At least the Greens have kept their integrity.

So the war is over. Time to kiss your loved ones in the streets and move on. It is only a matter of time now. There will be some lingering resistance, maybe a few last desperate rear-guard actions from those who can’t stand to be wrong, but nothing will change the inevitable outcome. Yes, so-called ‘soft’ drugs also cause harm, just like so many other things that are not illegal. Too much will melt your brain and probably give you cancer, especially if you smoke that frankendope stuff that the Dutch have created. But that’s not what it is about. It is about choice, and the right of adults to make wrong ones. It is not about hurting others, of course, so limits have to be placed on that freedom, but countless others have already been hurt by prohibition and incarceration, which makes that a rather weak argument.

Colorado has not gone up in flames. Holland has not collapsed into moral decay. New Zealand, ... um, well, the record with alcohol hasn’t been too brilliant but even here people have to grow up some time and it is no secret that more dope is already smoked here than anywhere else in the world. So legalise it, regulate it, tax it, and finally get some social benefit from it while depriving gangs of stepping-stone funding for far worse activities. Marijuana is in fact a gateway drug, but not in the sense that has always been claimed. Every successful new business starts out small with a cash cow product and expands into other lines as income is generated. Criminals do not go to banks to get finance for their meth labs. It is time they stopped getting it from this otherwise innocuous herb.