That's what the board promised, and that's what they had last night as the Public Safety Committee took up the issue of medical marijuana dispensaries. There wasn't a whole lot for me to poke fun at, which is probably a good thing.
I wrote a relatively long story that will appear in tomorrow's paper that gives a fairly thorough summary of the discussion. I'll have a few outtakes in the blog and column over the next couple days, starting with this:
As he said he had not heard any decent argument against allowing a medical marijuana dispensary in the city, Alderman Christopher Robinson said that not only did he not smoke pot, but that he had never had so much as a sip of alcohol. Nobody else chose to chime in with their own history, or lack thereof.
Robinson probably issued his denial for the same reason I issued mine in the column a few weeks back (while I did have my day in the sun, that day was good long time ago) -- opponents of medical marijuana have a tendency to dismiss anyone who isn't on their side as potheads.
I'll take Robinson at his word, but looking around the table, I had a lot of trouble believing I was the only person in that room who had ever inhaled.
A 2009 Department of Health Study estimated that 41 percent of Americans have smoked marijuana at least once -- and I've read plenty of suggestions that number is low. There were 16 people there last night, if I counted right, so the odds are that five or six other people who were at that meeting have toked up at some point in their lives.
If this debate continued, I wonder, would they own up?
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