by Jacob Barnes

Imagine a world where pot was entirely legal and anyone and everyone could smoke in peace. What changes would happen if we were to enter this alternate and devoutly-to-be-wished reality? What new adventures, attitudes, ideas and beliefs would come into play in a society where peace, love and understanding were the buzz words of the day, as opposed to aggression, greed and hate? If there’s one thing weed smokers like to do, it is to offer conjecture, and forthwith is an explanation of the “Weed-Venture” we would find ourselves on if we woke up tomorrow, like George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life” to find that all 420 laws had never been written in the first place.

For starters, let’s think about how much crime would cease to exist. The criminal marijuana industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, enforced through acts of violence at times so shocking it is amazing to conceive of the fact that these murders, rapes and more are being done in the service of distributing ganja. In our new weed-ality, these criminals have given up the green trade and focused on the white powders. It is not our place to judge those who use heroin or cocaine, but it is our duty to inform them that they are playing with fire, as these substances, in contrast to marijuana, are unlikely to produce no harmful side effects.

In the New Weed Order, these substances have been legalized but are dispensed with a decisive system of checks and balances such that the more harmful outcomes, such as heart disease, liver failure, outright addiction and death by overdose become a thing of the past.

But enough about death – let’s talk about sex, baby, let’s talk about you and me. So much of our conventional attitudes toward sex are caused by the repressive images and teachings we encounter in our childhood, at school, at home, and at houses of worship. Minds get locked into patterns, into plans that demand that WE MUST BE NORMAL (not NORML, just to be sure).

It’s A Green World After All

With marijuana free to unlock the minds of parent, preacher and principal alike, the status quo would inevitably be upended and the strict Puritan values that have turned us into a nation of basement sinners and hypocrites would be thrown out the window in favor of free love. Why do you think so many people have had sex in the mud at rock festivals? Their inhibitions were loosened by the mind opening properties of cannabis.

With pot in our imagined reality now available to all, we’d be talking about the mother of all love-ins, sexual liaisons unfettered by outmoded notions of appropriateness blossoming on every street corner, cats and dogs living together, a bacchanal that would do Hieronymous Bosch proud.

No longer would we walk the streets as if each of us bore an invisible scarlet “A” denoting that the pleasures of the flesh are at odds with the moral necessities of existence. Freeing our minds and following with our asses (and our other naughty bits), the whole system of sexual mores that has served to repress us for generations would melt away in a haze of pot vapor that would finally let us breathe freely as sexual beings.

The only beings more painfully repressive than the enforcers of sexual codes are the warmongers, who keep us in a sustained state of conflict, fighting needless battles and sacrificing needless lives. Their power-mad dreams would be abated by the wafting clouds of pot smoke that would sail through the halls of every seat of power from the White House to the Kremlin. Can you imagine a War on Terror in a world without fear, self-liberated through the antidote of MaryJane inspired peace, love, harmony and understanding.

Our educational system would undergo an overhaul of mammoth proportions, as students would no longer be subjected to the “standard curriculum” designed to re-enforce the notion that we are a free people, molded in the image of our founding Fathers, when in fact we live one step shy of being in a police state. Let that MaryJane cloud pour into our school faculty meetings and watch a radically re-organized and infinitely more positive approach to instructing the youth of America (and the world).

These “pipe” dreams need not be dismissed as idle fantasizing. The first step toward a world of united sentient beings celebrating the present moment with the facilitator of marijuana as a means to see the beauty of things can begin with stepping up to the ballot box and casting a vote for legalization.

For now, we remain in the Matrix, a reality pulled over us to blind us from the dark truth that the government (or at least the more sinister factions therein) would prefer to keep its hands tightly on the reins of power, outlawing the upright while celebrating the vicious. May the coming good times arrive right quick. May we sing from the hill tops a freedom song of mental liberation and frolic in the valley of unabashed freedom, not just freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also to the parallel goal of the pursuit of one-mind individualized society in which each and every member can be exactly who he or she wants to be thanks to the green. This can’t come a moment too soon.

Jacob Barnes writes for The Art of Mary Jane Magazine, the magazine dedicated to cannabis culture and marijuana culture.