When will marijuana become legal in Alabama?

I am now 67 years old. I have lived in Alabama all of my life. We don't have a lottery, probably never will. Lot of folks in this state have an idea that lotteries are bad, you should not gamble and you should do everything in your power to make sure that no one else can either. Some of those same people feel the same way about drinking alcohol. Bad, don't do it, stop others ,etc. Over the years, alcohol has gradually gained a foot hold. Although if you belong to certain cults, y'all know who you are, I won't call you out by name, you still may have to go to the ABC store in an adjacent city to get your libation but you can legally drink.

What about marijuana, where does it fall? Will it be like the lottery and become legal in Alabama when hell freezes over, or will it, like alcohol gradually permeate the heart of Dixie. My prediction is that it will be neither. I predict that marijuana acceptance will come about almost overnight. "When?" you ask. Well that depends on how fast the rest of the country legalizes marijuana. Based on what I see in the news, that will come about at a fairly swift pace. There will be other holdout states, Arkansas, Utah, maybe Oklahoma, but in a handful of years, I suspect that the majority of the states will have legal recreational marijuana and virtually all of the states will have legal medical marijuana. Now don't get me wrong, just because everybody else does it does not mean Alabama will do it. Just like the case with the lottery, Alabama would have no problem being the only state in the US in which marijuana is illegal, but under one scenario legalization can and will happen virtually overnight.

Picture in your mind a date it the not too distant future, marijuana is legal almost everywhere, except for Alabama of course. Things are still going pretty good in the state. We have elected another new Republican governor and legislature. They are attracting the occasional new business from outside the state, our taxes, (property, income and sales) while too high are still below the national average. Our education system is sadly plugging along but thanks to online studies our children are actually getting a better education than ever before. All seems right with the world except over in Tuscaloosa, the UofA has not won a football national championship in 10 years and over in Auburn, AU has finished out the the top 10,  five years in a row. Both schools go into panic mode to determine what is wrong. They hire high paid consultants that leave no stone un-turned to discover the reason for this totally unacceptable state of affair. The consensus opinion of the consultants is  that all of best football players in the country are going to schools in states where marijuana is legal. When this becomes public knowledge, Alabama will legalize marijuana, virtually overnight.

Did You Vote?

I used to work with an old man from Gardendale that never failed to come by my cubicle on election day and ask , did you vote? If it was a primary election I would tell him no. He would  tell me that I needed to go vote and I would explain to him that I did not vote in primary elections because I was neither a democrat nor a republican. He would then ask me, what are you? After the first time he should have known the answer so he was either very forgetful, which I doubt, or was just being an asshole. Anyway, at the time I considered myself to be a libertarian and would tell him so. He would always bristle up and say, we have to have traffic lights. I suppose that was his way of saying that libertarian is just another name for anarchist.

I have been retired a long time and I am fairly certain that the old man has made his way to the beulahland, which I suspect has no traffic lights, but in the intervening time I have learned that we in fact do not have to have traffic lights. Roundabouts work just as well and  have been shown to be safer.