[420 Girl]

ATLANTA -- "Take two tokes and call me in the morning."

The new practice of medicine or a druggie dodge?

Fourteen states permit the sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes. In the past the federal government refused to recognize the enabling statutes, counting them a violation of the precedence due federal law -- the emphatic stand of the recent Bush Justice Department. Now Washington and its regional U.S. attorneys will look the other way.

Attorney General Eric Holder had said last spring that such a change would be coming and here it is, in the form of a memo giving formal shape to the new policy. Marijuana dispensaries that follow state laws will no longer be operating under the constant threat of a federal raid and prosecution.

Sound move, over all. It takes the feds out of the costly and futile business of chasing a cat that is well out of the bag. With the ground rules and jurisdictions clarified, it should be easier for the states to police the trade.

Los Angeles presents a notoriously seedy evidence that firm enforcement is essential. Shops there have ballooned from 200 two years ago to 800, some with in-house docs who will write a prescription for anybody with the money for one.

Is this the ever-dreaded step on a slippery slope? Six additional states -- some reporters count a dozen -- were considering legalization for medical marijuana before Holder's policy switch and still more now seem likely to consider the idea.

But if it turns out this is a slippery-slope moment, it is hardly the first and next question is "So what?"

Many states and local jurisdictions have for some years treated the possession of small amounts of marijuana as a crime on par with parking too close to a fire hydrant.

Polls have long shown most of us favoring legalization of medical marijuana. And in practice, full legalization has a formidable constituency. Forty-plus percent of us have smoked pot.

Because the marijuana business is illegal, statistics about it are necessarily iffy, but there are some generalities that appear to hold up.

Marijuana is probably the nation's largest cash crop, but even so the demand is so large that the money Americans spend on imported weed provides about 60 percent of the income for murderous Mexican cartels. The nation loses between $40 billion and $100 billion a year is potential taxes -- and spends uncounted millions annually in the lost cause of trying quash the use of marijuana by criminalizing it.

Criminalization also appears to boost the use of far more dangerous drugs by compelling buyers to deal with sellers who have a vested interest in turning them on to more profitable addictive drugs.

So legalize pot and thus cut police, court and prison costs, crank up tax income, kneecap the Mexican cartels and undermine hard-drug use?

If experimentation by the states with medical marijuana, unmenaced by the feds and properly regulated locally, works out well, maybe the slippery slope could turn out to be a smart ride.


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