A great op-ed by Redding, California resident Baran Galocy appeared this weekend in the city's local newspaper, the The Record Searchlight. It's a perfect example of the type of piece we hope you will write and submit to your local newspaper. And if it gets published, let us know, and we'll hype it here on our blog, just like this one!

A few choice excerpts: 

May we please discuss marijuana, medical or otherwise, and alcohol in the same sentence? If I were to try to poison myself to death by consuming alcohol, I could easily do so. That was proved in our community last year. Were alcohol illegal and marijuana legal, perhaps we wouldn't have lost a minor to alcohol poisoning last year. No regular user has ever "poisoned" themselves with marijuana and no one has ever died as a direct result of having smoked it...

Domestic violence is fueled by the consumption of alcohol. Someone who just got high is inhabiting an entirely different mental construct than one who just drank. I have never met a violent "stoner," although I have met more than my fair share of obnoxious, violent drunks. Logic dictates that any drinker who is against legalizing marijuana is a world-class hypocrite...

The bottom line is that, like it or not, this is the end of an era... We are watching very bad law under deconstruction.