(NOTE: This little screed was written circa August of 2012, and managed to ferment in the airtight basement that is FaceBook. It perhaps got more attention than anything else I’ve ever written there.  My hope is you get a laugh here as well.)

I work in law enforcement. And I support the legalization of marijuana.

Surprise you? Make you smile? Well, don’t get yourself worked up into a convivial ticker-tape confab just yet, because you may not appreciate the scope of just why I do.

My reasoning simply exists as a sort of fingerling tributary off the “because it will de-criminalize the market and it can be taxed” bromide. The exception being that I am not really interested in devaluing the black-market capitalist motivations of Chronic moguls as much as I am in devaluing the definitions of two other terms impregnated at the rhetorical cathouse: Patient, and Co-Op.

The reasoning? because legalization will immediately undermine the contrived sanctimony of these two terms and bring them back their original, definitional terra firma: Stoners. You are in fact, a basic, uninteresting toke monkey.

I’m willing to vote in your incapacitating latitude just to shut you up, and the sanctimonious horse you rode in on. I don’t want to hear about your “post traumatic Stress Disorder” anymore. You weren’t hit with a roadside bomb, you sprained your wrist at South City Park. You weren’t pumped full of plasma at a M*A*S*H* unit in South Korea. You sustained a paper-cut using a plastic shard to reveal a Scratch-Off at 7-11.

Since when does one’s desire to burn one allow you to make the sophist leap to a Purple Heart?

I simply want you to have the freedom to say “I like checking out. I like not working and having you do it in my stead. I just like being a loser.” See, I don’t want you borrowing the definitions that actually meant something when my 2 1/2 year-old daughter nearly died in the hospital from a five-day flu that dehydrated her to the edge of the mortal curtain. You? You need marijuana to do what, exactly? Help you kick your addiction to employment? Make your PlayStation manual more user-friendly?

You act like Marijuana is the palliative panacea for everything: Chickweed, post-nasal drip, bi-polar turns, Eczema, Plantar Fasciitis, open-wounds, leg-amputations, and can perhaps reveal in some side-channel of elightenment how the Egyptians managed to block and tackle all those callibrated stones at Cheops’ Pyramid in Giza. Just quit it. Tylenol does more for what you try to claim you get out of smoking a blunt–it’s just that smoking Tylenol doesn’t allow you to draw long, interpretive impressions from the Sergeant Pepper’s album cover and make excuses for regrettable, procreative sex with people for whom you NEED the “I blacked out” excuse.

As for these self-aggrandizing co-op doohickeys, I have even less respect for you. How many times in my local paper am I going to have to listen to you, donning sackcloth and ashes, acting like the already-lenient laws are the equivalent of buying a truckload of Ipads with pediatric Leukemia research money? How many times am I going to have to read another paragraph, where another pajama-clad co-op do-gooder tries to galvanize their mission into terms as if they’re Florence Nightingale, setting up tourniquets on the battlefield of the Crimean War? Nobody of any real thought pursuit buys this load of rubbish beyond the saccharine predication of the newsprint.

You’re not Patch Adams, champ. You’re a pot dealer hiding in the skirts of Dr. Quinn.

Of course, there are mitigating issues. I get it. Nausea after Chemo? Yep. I have it on good authority that it works. Swimmingly. Oh, yeah, I forgot. My friend’s post-chemo regimen to ameliorate nausea using marijuana meant imbibing it orally–not stuffing the bowl of a four-gallon motorized bong with Colombian Gold and excoriating her lungs while trying to talk through harsh-cough.

I know, I know. She wasn’t taking it as prescribed. Shut up again.

Oh, and for the “but alcohol kills more BLAH BLAH BLAH” argument: Guess what? You’re right. You’re still a loadie, I still don’t drink, and I’m still right about your annoying comandeering of passive terms for your toke-up.

So that’s it. I don’t care if you play for Team Stoner. Chances are I’ll still like you. Chances are I will have acquaintances that manage to do it socially from time to time. I just want you to take off the jersey of the first-string Team With Legitimate Medical Concerns. And if I have to vote to legalize the stuff so that you’ll crawl back into your VW and resume smoking yourself into some odd, moralizing half-light, fine. Just get out of my lexicon.