Wanna Get High?

    I've lived all over this country.  It's not bad.  It really is homogenous.  I, initially left the cocoon of small-town Pennsylvania 45 years ago.  Tourist- like travel is worthless. I can get as much by reading a travel book or watching a documentary. If you wanna know a place; live there, work there, make friends there, get high there.  Be a brief, unwilling guest of a local county jail or play golf at a country club. Play some poker or a board game. Play pool.  Get laid.  I recommend all of those things but getting cuffed and stuffed isn't as nice as the country club thing. The buffet is no where near as good and the hired help in uniform is not as polite. I will say they always call you sir and mister in a county jail but you can tell they really don't mean it.  The staff at a country club doesn't mean it either but they do try harder to hide it.
    Here's something that's true. I can walk into a neighborhood bar in any corner of this country, as a total stranger and within a half hour either meet someone who will sell me marijuana or direct me to someone who can. The same is true of various forms of other  drugs.  That's uniform. That, also, is America.  Any statement that doesn't acknowledge anyone who wants marijuana has been able to buy marijuana for decades is just silly.
    That implies a decades long, logistic and supply system that rivals Johnson and Johnson or Bristol Meyers.  It also implies an entrenched system of clandestine wealth and extensive graft that kinda boggles the mind. The truth is and has been that anyone who wants drugs can have drugs. Euphoria is popular. Go figure.
    This is something people don't get:  Generations now, have experimented with drugs. Anecdotally,  I'd say about 1%  managed to get into some sort of trouble. They were pretty spectacular about it but they were few. They were never the best and/or brightest of us.
    Here's what the legalization of marijuana really means.  They are watching, closely, how the issues of banking, taxation and transition from clandestine to mainstream income will be handled. They are also watching how authorities from the local level to the national level can be weaned from the graft and moved into legitimate profit.  A guy like Bill Bennett wasn't the drug Czar to coordinate law enforcement activity.  He was there to coordinate the graft.  A national clearing house for bribery.
    At the end of Prohibition the government changed the currency from the "foot longs" to what we are familiar with today. They didn't do that to save paper. They did that to bring the clandestine wealth from bootlegging back into the legitimate economy.  Have your 100's, twenties, tens and fives changed lately?  Do you really believe that was done to defeat the couple hundred millions that could account for counterfeiting?  I'm thinking the couple trillion in the underground drug money was the real reason. As it should be.
    In answer to your questions: No, I haven't been high in 15 years. I just got tired of it. I like scotch and a good cigar. But I also like money. This emerging, legitimate market looks like an investment opportunity to me. We'll see.