Imagine that it's OK to get high and that you could acquire your drug or drugs of choice across the counter at a reasonable cost from a licensed dispensary. Imagine that the police and legal authorities had no stake in what might be going on in your head as long as you weren't hurting anyone or breaking the established codes of social conduct. Imagine that the people who grow, manufacture and supply your drug needs are treated like producers of other essential goods and services, allowed to make a reasonable profit and pay the appropriate taxes into the public treasury.

Imagine that the police had absolutely no power of arrest with respect to recreational drug users unless we were to commit some sort of actual crime. Imagine that they weren't allowed to tear your car or your home apart looking for drugs or the attendant paraphernalia. Imagine the vast number of closed police stations, courtrooms, jails and prisons, the shuttered probation and parole offices and drug treatment centers. Imagine that those police forces that remained were directed toward detecting and confiscating unregistered or illegal weapons of human destruction.

Then imagine the resultant savings in tax dollars and the massive redirection of tax revenues to underwrite music and arts programs in schools, free health care for the sick and damaged among us, expanded human services of every kind instead of money wasted on the idiotic War on Drugs. Imagine a society where you can get high and go about your business without fear of persecution, arrest or punishment of any kind except that which you may inflict upon yourself in the course of your experimentation and habitual use of your drugs of choice.

In the immortal words of the bard (who, by the way, smoked the stuff):

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

—Oxford, Miss.

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