{"id":1933,"date":"2010-04-20T15:41:26","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T15:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1933"},"modified":"2010-04-20T15:41:26","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T15:41:26","slug":"something_to_ponder_on_420","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2010\/04\/20\/something_to_ponder_on_420\/","title":{"rendered":"Something to Ponder on 4\/20"},"content":{"rendered":"

As previously stated, I have never smoked pot nor do I have any inclination to ever alter that condition. Nevertheless, I have become convinced that it’s time to change our nation’s destructive, expensive, and ultimately futile drug policies. Consider the following (just ignore the psychadelic animation, retro film clips, and moldy damn-hippie music, which regrettably trivialize the otherwise rational argument being presented):<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

Here’s a little more food for thought: that promised $6 billion in annual tax revenue is exactly the amount by which President Obama is proposing to expand NASA’s budget. You want to go back to the moon or to Mars? It just might be possible — or at least a little more plausible — if we get practical about turning mary-jane and other assorted money-sinks into revenue streams.<\/p>\n

My thanks to Sullivan<\/a> for posting this video. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the “4\/20” reference in this entry’s title, it seems that this date, April 20, a.k.a. 4\/20 or just 420, has become a sort of counterculture holiday. The University of Colorado in Boulder hosts the pre-eminent celebration<\/a> of this day; every year, thousands of people gather on the U of C’s quad and light up at exactly 4:20 PM in a sort of communal mass toke. Not my sort of thing, but hey, I’m basically a live-and-let-live kind of guy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As previously stated, I have never smoked pot nor do I have any inclination to ever alter that condition. Nevertheless, I have become convinced that it’s time to change our nation’s destructive, expensive, and ultimately futile drug policies. Consider the following (just ignore the psychadelic animation, retro film clips, and moldy damn-hippie music, which regrettably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}