From the Editor: Louisiana and reefer madness

The Louisiana Legislature is moving closer to easing up on marijuana smokers. A couple of major bills are making their way through the process this week, one on medical marijuana and one that has the potential to legalize weed altogether.
The jokes write themselves, don’t they?
“If the Legislature stays totally stoned for the whole session, will we be able to tell the difference?”
“I guess we finally found out what ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ are.”
“The papers on the governor’s desk today are the Advocate, the Shreveport Times and Strawberry EZ Widers.”
Even if those qualify as actual jokes, marijuana is a serious matter.
The arrest report in today’s paper is typical: four people were arrested by the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Office on marijuana possession charges over the weekend.
That’s four more potential cases for drug court, four more people who have to hire lawyers, and who knows how many job applications that answer “yes” on questions about criminal convictions and drug use. Or lie.
Equally typical is the fact that one of the suspects’ list of charges includes motor vehicle offenses, indicating the drug arrest resulted from a traffic stop.
We see that a lot. Lots of people are driving around St. Mary Parish with drugs in the car.
Whatever the effects it might have, pro or con, and no matter what happens with the current bills, legalized marijuana is in our future.
The tax revenue is seductive, and we’ve already shown we’re willing to gamble.
The gamble
About five years ago, this column speculated that marijuana madness might sweep over Louisiana the way gambling spread through the state in the 1990s.
At the start of that decade, I moved to Louisiana from Alabama, where the only form of legal gambling was getting involved in an argument between Crimson Tide and Auburn fans around Thanksgiving.
It’s hard to believe now, but legal gambling in Louisiana in 1990 was all about horse racing and bingo. And you can hear stories about how hard the Affiliated Blind of Louisiana had to work to get legal bingo in order to finance its operations.
The leader of the nonprofit was tagged with a nickname: “Le Parrain,” French for the Godfather.
But in 1990, Louisiana was just coming out of the 1980s oil glut. Because state revenue relied so heavily on energy production and because oil prices fell so low, higher education and state law enforcement had taken major budget hits in the 1980s. The charity hospital system was in danger of losing certification for some of its medical residency programs.
Gambling was one of the remedies sought by the Legislature. Before the decade was half over, Louisiana had not just bingo and horse racing, but its own lotto game, scratch-off lottery cards, riverboats, a land-based casino in New Orleans and video poker. And that’s not counting Indian casinos, which resulted from agreements between each tribe and the feds.
Better bet
Until recently, if you wanted to bet on legalized marijuana in Louisiana, you were betting against long odds. We’re a conservative state becoming more conservative, and on the right, drug legalization seemed like a good idea only on the libertarian fringe.
We are, however, in another one of those pesky oil price troughs that hit St. Mary’s economy the way a stoner tears into a bag of Double-Stuff Oreos.
We’re doing OK for now. But sooner or later, Uncle Sam is going to turn off the COVID money spigot. And where will we be then?
Of the two high-profile marijuana bills now in Baton Rouge, one is more about humanity than money.
House Bill 391 by state Rep. Tanner Magee, R-Houma, would allow doctors to suggest raw marijuana for smoking as the form that patients who meet the legal criteria for medicinal marijuana should get.
The doctors can’t actually prescribe the marijuana under federal law. But they can give a wink and a nod as they point the patient toward a legal source.
Magee’s bill passed easily in the House on Monday.
House Bill 699 by state Rep. Richard Nelson, R-Mandeville, has more to do with cash.
Nelson would like to see a statewide election Nov. 8, 2022, to ask voters whether they want to make it legal to smoke pot just because you want to. If your dream is to open a doobie boutique, you’d be able to get a license for $2,500. If you want to grow your own, you’d need a $100 permit.
Marijuana sale or production would be forbidden in parishes where the majority voted against legalization, but smoking or eating marijuana would still be legal there.
Nelson says he’s not in favor of using marijuana, per se, but people are smoking it anyway. So why not raise some cash? He estimates the state’s take would be $100 million to $200 million a year.
The bill was approved by the House Committee on Criminal Justice Administration by a 7-5 vote.
Attitudes
Views on marijuana have softened over the years.
Those of us old enough to have been the hippies and freaks of the Sixties and Seventies are now senior citizens. We’ve come to admire anything that can take away minor aches and pains. Maybe we’ve emerged from cranky middle age to be more inclined to live and let live, too.
Somewhere between 13 and 17 states have now legalized the recreational use of marijuana, depending on how you define “legalized.” Thirty-six states, including Louisiana, have legalized medical marijuana.
David Jacobs of The Center Square quotes pollster John Couvillon as saying that 67% of Louisiana people who responded to a recent poll are in favor of recreational legalization. It was 54% last year.
But even aging hippies have to admit that the days of peace, love and dope are long gone. Drug culture has taken a sinister turn, or at least the sinister part has become more visible.
The Sixties and Seventies had the Zig Zag Man and Cheech & Chong. Succeeding generations got Pablo Escobar and the oxy-flinging Sackler family.
We have been told for decades that marijuana isn’t addictive. But how many of us also know that one person who says things like, “I’ve smoked marijuana every day since Woodstock and I never got addicted!”
The organizations representing sheriffs and district attorneys have taken stands against legal marijuana. So has the Louisiana Family Forum.
A couple of things about politicians, though: They can read polls, and they can read budgets. That’s what makes legalized marijuana a sure bet, sooner or later.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.

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