#420 When I was a junior in high school I was in the statewide model senate and I floated a bill to legalize marijuana. I'm old, this was 1990. It was easily the most exciting and controversial bill that session.

I was a longhaired alternateen, most of the other kids were buttoned up, but brilliant, private school kids. Phillips Exeter, etc. There was a hippie from some other school there, Felix, who had infamously floated a similar bill the year before and been slaughtered.

I wasn't there that year but he had apparently been cogent enough that MY year there were a number of kids on the pro side, including Felix and the lessons he had learned, primed for the fight.

The fact that we were absolutely in the right helped also.

It was not a slaughter.

The debate was extremely exciting. I had a bunch of stuff I had gotten from the library, and at like NORML friendly bookstores and head shops, and I waved it around and spouted various facts and figures.

"Hemp was the number one cash crop of the US before 1880" "They renamed it marijuana to sound scary and foreign, and when the US dept of agriculture realized they filed a brief saying they were against decriminalization" etc

At one point one of the buttoned up anti faction demanded where I had gotten my information.

I was ready for this. ”It’s from ‘An Agricultural Path to Victory’, Johannes Lippencott. Princeton University Press, 1942. Library of Congress number 23014506.” The other guy scrambled to write it down but he didn’t have access to easily verify or dispell. Again, 1990.

Reader, I made it up.

At one point I ran out of time, right in the middle of an impassioned argument. Felix got the floor and did the whole, "I YIELD MY TIME TO THE SENATOR FROM FRANKLIN HIGH!" thing, bringing cheers from the pro crowd.

Again, it was very exciting.

At some point, someone from the anti-crowd threw a clever curve ball, they amended the bill to be "legal for medical use only" and rushed it to vote.

They knew we were right, but were punishing the recreational use crowd! I desperately argued, but was shut off. I voted no on the entire bill. But it passed by a large margin. It passed!

I regret three things about this all: 1) The aforementioned falsified LOC number. Oh well.

2) My peevishness in not voting for the bill. Oh well.

3) At one point an anti senator, sitting near me, said some comment or other to me. Snide, but not all that mean. I was really heated up though and I snapped, "what does someone like you know about it!"

Christ, what an asshole. Still sorry about it, and I have thought about it maybe monthly for the past 28 years. I apologized, but still. Bad senator.

On the bus back home we all talked about it and decided it would never happen in the real world. Not in 100 years. Ha!

Anyway, that's my 420 story. Here's to you, Felix, wherever you are.

Incidentally, I haven't smoked the weeds since last millennium, and if I were to do a bill now it would be about trying to mitigate and reverse some of the damage that criminalization has to done to people of color.