Let’s legalize marijuana.

I could not be more blunt (oh ho!) or emphatic here.

The approval of Colorado’s Amendment 64 is a landmark event. Finally, we are making some sort of progress towards actually legalizing the leafy substance.

I remember hearing about the same issue back in 2006. People were excited by the prospect of being able to legally hold in their hands a small bag of weed.

Sadly, the legislation they tried to push through wasn’t satisfactory. For a long time things seemed to be dormant. However, as this election drew ever closer, I began hearing more and more about bud. Watching the documentary Grass did a lot to change my mind some years ago.

Marijuana was something that had interested me (my best friend at the time was going through a major hippy phase and I was along for the ride to a point) though I was so straight-laced that it had never crossed my mind to attempt to procure such a substance.

We had done some really dumb stuff in lieu. Scouring the Internet, we searched for a legal high.

We tried smoking peanut husks, which resulted in us looking like idiots, sitting in a circle on my friend’s trampoline smoking toilet-paper doobies filled with dry brown husks.

We tried smoking banana peels. We tried a number of different things; however, we never ventured off into dangerous territory. A lot of youth without a means to get high usually resort to huffing gasoline, or air-duster, or popping pills, or any number of legal substances that are exponentially more dangerous than marijuana.

Y’see, kids, when younguns are desperate – or anyone really, young or old – to get inebriated, they will venture off into new territory.

They will attempt to use what is available to them if they come to such a point. Generally, the results aren’t as cute as, say, a bunch of 15-year-old pseudo-hippies trying to get their jollies on peanuts. Usually the result is much darker, and much more harmful.

Now, the age for possession of one ounce of marijuana in Colorado is 21. I suppose that I can’t complain now, considering I just hit the big 21 recently. Younger kids are going to get a hold of it. They know this. They have laws in place, but it’s going to happen.

But it was going to happen anyway.

According to the Adolescent Substance Abuse Knowledge Base, 57 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 said  they could easily obtain marijuana. This was in 1999, so the information is a little dated, but it sounds correct to me.

Now, what is comforting about this is that if marijuana were legalized in a state such as Missouri, there would be a slew of regulations to keep it out of their hands.

It won’t work, but it wasn’t going to work anyway. People still buy pot. Laws don’t do much to stop that. The war on drugs is thrashing against a wave that seeks to overwhelm it. The legislation behind marijuana has been backwards since the 30s anyway.

However, I believe that the legalization initiative would keep young adults from attempting such desperate measures as sniffing glue or rifling through their grandparents’ medicine cabinets to get a fix.

I’m not sure how Missouri will handle the situation. The conservative slant here is almost vertical. Almost.

While the issue was not on the ballot Nov. 6, Show-Me Cannabis is sponsoring the Marijuana Legalization and Regulation Initiative. The measure seeks to decriminalize marijuana in Missouri and allow use, cultivation and possession. The legal age to partake would be 21. The measure was approved for circulation Nov. 7. To register for the ballot, the initiative requires signatures equal to 5 percent of the total votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election.

That doesn’t seem like it will be too difficult to get. Perhaps now that Amendment 64 has passed for Colorado and Washington, people will have a chance to see the outcome of legalized recreational use of marijuana. I anticipate they will set a good example.

Who knows? Maybe soon we can “break out the Cheetos or Goldfish” as Gov. John Hickenlooper has so eloquently stated.

I think it’s about time.