Even These Guys Want to Legalize It!

In Kevin Drum's excellent "Patriot's Guide to Legalization" he estimates that "Ten years from now, as the flower power generation enters its 70s, you might finally be able to smoke a fully legal, taxed, and regulated joint."

10 years!?!? That's way too long! Too long for Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, our national forests, the overcrowded prison system, the southern border, 259 US cities, and the entire country of Mexico.

Who, exactly, are the forces aligned against the decriminalization of marijuana? Who makes it politically untenable for politicians to sign on to bills like the one California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has introduced? Somewhat surprisingly, it isn't the intellectual right. On the most recent episode of the McLaughlin Group, conservatives Rich Lowry and Monica Crowley agreed with their more liberal co-panelists in coming out for the decriminalization of marijuana. At one point during the discourse John McLaughlin rattles off a long list of prominent conservative and mainstream intellectuals—William Buckley, George Schultz, Milton Friedman, Walter Cronkite—all of whom supported decriminalization. Sure, Monica Crowley stills mouths off some BS about how pot is a gateway drug, but that's more than made up for when Lowry recalls a colleague of his for whom cannabis provided the only relief from chemo. This all comes in the wake of the Cato Institute's publication of Glenn Greenwald's report on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.

Watch the McLaughlin Group duke it out, and by duke it out I mean totally agree with each other, after the jump.

• The Patriot's Guide to Legalization

  Have you ever looked at our marijuana policy? I mean, really looked at it?

• Altered States of America

  What a long, strange trip it's been: a drug war timeline.

• This Is Your War on Drugs

  Since 1998, the drug czar has been mandated to lie to the American people. So what would a fact-based drug policy look like?