Nate Silver at the very cool polling blog FiveThirtyEight has another angle on the growing support for marijuana legalization.

Put simply, the percentage of Americans who've ever tried marijuana is getting bigger. There are steadily fewer voters out there who grew up before the 60's and 70's. Naturally, people who have experience with marijuana are less likely to be fearful of it and support harsh penalties for users.

Interesting. In other words, support for marijuana reform is likely to increase over time regardless of anything we say or do. That doesn't mean we don’t have our work cut out for us, but it's another factor to keep in mind when we run into new obstacles. The fight is exhausting, but time is on our side in a very real way.


from fivethirtyeight.com

I visited Boston this weekend for the Northeast Regional SSDP Conference and was curious to observe that no one was smoking marijuana on the sidewalks. Weird, huh? It's been months now since Massachusetts decriminalized small-time marijuana possession and yet it almost felt as though I wasn't surrounded by hippies in a skunky smoldering ashtray from hell.

Good thing I kept the receipt for that gasmask. This is great news for everyone, especially all the police officials who were genuinely concerned that life in Massachusetts would be at least partially destroyed if the punishment for marijuana was reduced slightly.

Those cops must really be glad that no one listened to them and everything worked out this way, because now we've got the best of both worlds: 1) fewer people have their lives messed up by getting a criminal record for pot, and 2) nobody blows bong hits in your face when you're trying to hail a taxicab.

It's really beautiful to see that the collective goodness of mankind can somehow prevent an intoxicating plant from utterly destroying the world.

This post from Pete Guither made me laugh twice. Just because a story is about drugs doesn’t mean you can get away with mind-blowing factual errors or unnecessary slang. The news is supposed to make people smart, not turn us into morons.

I've posted a couple new items in the Flex Your Rights blog recently that are worth checking out. We've got an awesome site upgrade coming out soon, so I'm trying to get back into the habit of doing at least a couple posts a week.

The focus is on 4th Amendment and police misconduct issues rather than drug policy specifically, but I'd love to see some of you commenting over there if you're interested.

The matrix of global drug prohibition was reloaded in Vienna last month -- the only change being a new target date for making the world drug free. Video from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union: