[420 Girl]

You'd have to be high to think banning the sale of individual cigars would stop young people from smoking marijuana - or at the very least, you'd have to be very out of touch. And yet, last week Prince George's County became what seems to be the first municipality in the country to ban the sale of individual cigars. County councilmembers said the measure will target the common practice of emptying cheap cigars of tobacco to smoke marijuana. We fear the law will do little more than spur an uptick in the purchasing of wrapping papers and paraphernalia.

Still, what's most troubling about the law is the attitude behind it, which says that anti-drug laws don't always require logical bearing on reality. And in this sense, the law is indicative of the larger problem of how we as a society confront society's ills. If history has taught us anything about prohibition or the "Just say no" motto of the '80s, it's that officials must honestly evaluate social problems before they can solve them.

When it comes to marijuana, the Prince George's County Council doesn't have a clue. Marijuana is certainly not a harmless hobby, as one extreme sometimes portrays it, but it's not an existential threat to every child's future, either. The argument behind the county's ban is that teenagers see blunts glorified in popular culture and smoke them to be cool. Having to fork over an extra $2 at the 7-Eleven isn't going to change that.

But to accept the assumption that teenagers smoke marijuana because they see Snoop Dogg do it in music videos makes broad stereotypes about who youth drug users are and the ideals they hold. Maybe the county's efforts would be better spent focusing on after-school programming. Maybe the county should invest more in drug education.

We're not going to pretend we know the answers to the social ills public officials perceive in the county, but we do know that to fix them they need to deal with them openly and honestly. And in this sense, perhaps county officials could take a few pages from the university and its students.

More than 100 chapters of Students for Sensible Drug Policy convened on the campus last weekend to talk about legislative solutions to the nation's quagmire of a war on drugs. And while we haven't seen any concrete results yet, the university's six-hour long alcohol summit last month showed positive steps toward trying to understand a problem before trying to impose a prescription.

Such parallels may not be as practical on the county level, but that doesn't excuse the law's misguided assumptions. Ultimately, the law may give a few kids pause before going to smoke a blunt. And better yet, it might make those cheap grape cigars a little bit less of a gateway into smoking tobacco. But it won't address Prince George's County's social ills. And until public officials can be honest about them, the county council never will never come up with effective solutions.

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...nch-smoke.html