A Potent New Strain of Marijuana Advocate

This isn’t your father’s marijuana advocate. Move over Hockey Moms and Soccer Moms; make way for Marijuana Moms.

There are several women's groups — including Moms for Marijuana and the Women’s Marijuana Movement — that are campaigning for marijuana legalization.

The majority of women are still against legalizing pot. One recent survey shows legalization favored by 52% of men and 37% of women. The most common reason for mothers being in favor of legalized pot is that it’s safer than alcohol and tobacco. Another reason: the fact that pot is illegal means that your child’s pot connection brings him/her into contact with a lot of unsavory people who sell harder drugs.

It’s the old “gateway drug” nonsense being looked at from a different (logical) angle. If it’s true that “98% of all heroin addicts started off on marijuana!!!” — it’s because of our drug laws; not the drug itself. If you have access to pot, you probably have access to other drugs too. There isn’t anything intrinsic in marijuana itself that makes it a gateway drug. Pot doesn’t contain an alkaloid that makes you go “huh, this is OK, but now I want to move up to cocaine, then speed, then heroin.”

But who needs logic when we can have eighty years of “Reefer Madness!” and “Assassin of Youth!” hysteria.

There’s another organization called Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER), which is planning a campaign of lobbying and protesting. A group member, Jessica Corry, says “it’s our own little tea party moment.” (And she’s a Republican by the way.)

Corry compares the potential of these groups to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and the fact that a women’s group — Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform — played a large role in getting Prohibition repealed in 1929.