It’s all about the continued growth of the prison industry – and “industry” is the right word for it, given the increase in prison-labor contracts with private employers and the ongoing privatization of corrections operations themselves.

As Jenifer rightly points out, there are any number of things far more destructive than marijuana that are nevertheless completely legal. Well, there’s a reason our nation’s anti-drug fanatics chose such a comparatively placid target – they knew it would generate enough raw fodder for the jaws of the prison system.

More destructive drugs, like heroin and meth, wouldn’t provide enough convicts on their own, because their extremely destructive properties are enough to scare off all but the people whose lives are already so hosed that they’d see these toxic chemicals as a comparative improvement. Pot, on the other hand, isn’t all that scary in and of itself – leaving a much larger base of potential users for the government to step in and incarcerate as profit generators for the likes of Wackenhut – and, in possibly the REAL endgame, a large base of people who can be miscast as an army of dangerous criminals in an attempt to sell the public on ever-more-invasive law enforcement tactics and ever-more-thorough rollbacks of our Constitutional rights.

And yet there are laws set up against homosexual rights.

Come on folk, where do you think the tax money would come if there were not smokers out there?