Well said Evan.  America needs to rethink our "war on drugs"  and focus our limited drug-war assets on drugs that are truly a threat. 

 We also need to think about de-criminalizing marijuana and also allow hemp to be utilized for all of its manufacturing uses.

Cannabis is non-toxic, meaning you can't die from it.  You can eat it and smoke it day in and day out, and it won't kill you.  You might feel extremely weird, but you'll be alive.  That's a lot more than what can be said for tabacco and alcohol.

The "war on drugs" started with the Marijuanna Stamp Tax act, which was a take-off on the machine-gun stamp tax act.  In both cases, the law was enacted without actually making any "stamps."  Then, as people took in their crop (or machine gun) to provide proof for obtaining the stamp, as was the "law," they were simply arrested.  

The war on pot has been propeganda from the beginning, originally used to incriminate mexicans, not actually because of any danger or dislike of pot.  But then a man you might know -- William Hearst -- started to run yellow journalism ads on marijuanna for his own personal vandette against the crop.  He published completely false articles that contradicted each other -- such as marijuanna makes negros homicidal rapists, to it makes negros catatonic and zombie-like.  Just a bunch of lies.

Anyway, your local police and our government in general doesn't know any of this.  They have been told by their peers and elders that pot is bad bad bad, and they believe it like good little children, instead of researching the history and clinical trials, which indicate it is completely harmless.

I don't know if the government will get its head out of its ass anytime soon.  With Bush in charge, that is not a likely bet.  There are hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned, fined, and had their homes seized for growing the "evil" cannabis plant, when, it was in exceptionally wide use before the 1900s -- for clothes, ropes, sails, sacks, and paper.

I'm in California, so I smoke it legally.  There are dozens of legal pot shops I can walk into and buy just about any strain I like.  In Canada, you can even get it legally through the mail.  I sure do hope the rest of America wakes up to this not only harmless, but extremely useful crop.  Actually, it grows 4 times faster than cotton, and is more durable.  Why it has such a bad name is just ALL PROPEGANDA.