I don't usually pat attention to the Summer Olympics at all.  Baseball is on, and I always have a ton of discs in the queue to catch up with, shows I've recorded.  The Olympics are like the Final Four to me -- mostly a guarantee that one network, at least is not adding more shows to the backlog..

But is there anyone out there with the slightest enjoyment of sports who wasn't dragged into last summer's games by the incredible performance of Michael Phelps?  I can't even swim, and I could appreciate his incredibly mastery of the water.  (And while I usually dislike the chauvinism that makes the anthem played for the winners more important than the performances that won the awards, I'll admit that knowing Phelps was an American did add an extra bit of joy to watching him smash records.)

And football is enjoyable -- once the World Series is over -- but I usually get so determined to avoid the two weeks of hype before the Super Bowl that sometimes I forget to switch my attention back on for the game itself -- even when one of my teams is playing.  (I like Pittsburgh teams -- don't ask me why since I've never lived or had the slightest desire to visit there.)

But this year's Super Bowl was super, a great, exciting game.  And Santonio Holmes' wonderful catch won his team the game and himself the MVP Award.

I could enjoy both performances, and did, before I knew Phelps and Holmes shared something with me -- a liking for marijuana.

Everybody knows the Phelps story by now, and his apology -- not for smoking pot but for doing it in public and affecting his image -- and Kellogg's failing to renew his contract.  But I missed the small story from October that announced that Holmes had been suspended for a game because he had a couple of blunts in his car when he was stopped by the police.  (The police apparently smelled familiar scents coming from the van, and despite his insistence that 'he hadn't been smoking then, the smell was from the day before,' they searched the vehicle anyway.)

They are hardly the only ones.  As Chuck Culpepper writes in <a href="http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-sports-marijuana8-2009feb08,0,1583371.story">this</a>, a lot of sports figures have been found with the horrible weed -- the one that's supposed to be so bad for coordination, concentration, and physical dexterity. Still

"It has appeared this week in the suitcase of an arrested college basketball point guard at an airport, and this winter in the possession of a former Dallas receiver, and a Seattle linebacker, and a Florida State receiver, and a retired NBA forward/center, and amid a Japanese sumo wrestling scandal if you can believe such, and in November with a New York Jets defensive end, and last spring in that bellwether moment on talk radio, when Dallas Mavericks forward Josh Howard readily said he enjoyed an inhale."

Is my point that you can be a great athelete while smoking marijuana?  No, although it is a good one.  (Everyone seems to be carefuly avoiding asking Phelps about past smoking, or whether they coincided with the time leading up to his performance.  But Holmes had, by his own admission been smoking during the season.)

My point is that, except for Phelps, these stories were new to me, and probably to most of you.  (And if anyone knows about the sumo wrestling -- please share.)  They were one paragraph stories buried in summaries of 'sports news of the day.  There were no editorials demanding the smokers be banned, or suspended for the season.  In fact, the general reaction was 'ho hum, so what?"  (Sorta reminiscent of the yawns that would have greeted news stories about Babe Ruth and other baseball players enjoying  the -- then not only illegal but unconsitutional -- drink of alcohol.)

Even the Phelps story has been more about his poor judgment in allowing himself to be smoking, rather than condemnation of the smoking itself.  And, as far as I've been able to tell, the Kellogg's story has hurt the company more than Phelps -- with some in the blogosphere, perhaps unfairly, reminding people of some of the totally insane ideas held by the brothers who founded the company.  (THE NUTS AMONG THE BERRIES is out of print, but THE ROAD TO WELLSVILLE is a good fictionalization of the ideas that caused them to invent the flakes some of us eat every morning.)

But the company hasn't trotted out the tens of thousands -- or thousands -- or tens -- of letters they received praising their bold stand and condemning the 'dirty hippie dope fiend' Phelps.  Maybe they received them, but I've yet to see a story mentioning them.  People don't seem to care that much.

And THAT, at last, is my point.  People don't care.  Not only do polls continually show a majority of people favoring legalization, but I wonder how many of those who vote no would check off a box reading "I think it's a bad idea, but if it happened, it wouldn't bother me much."

It isn't 'the people' who are afraid of legalization but the politicians.  Not for any conspiratorial reason, but because they are afraid of being tied into the image of the Sixties.  At least they were.  The Republicans tried desperately to link one politician to an authentic 60s hippie radical who would have been actually dangerous back then --if he wasn't so incompetent.  Somehow, the politician still managed to get elected President.  Maybe they'll finally learn how that fears should be as dead as the ghosts creating them.

There was no outrage at Phelps.  No sermons I know of condemning him as an example of the 'permissive society.'  No one has reproduced articles from World Nut Daily about Phelps and Holmes demonstrating the physical deterioration drug use causes pointing to them as examples of 'celebrities thinking they are above the law.'

This is why I am shouting so insistently, trying to get discussion started, here and in my previous post.  Some politician is going to be the 'first olive out of the bottle,' and soon, if they start hearing a focused discussion from parts of the blogosphere, if they get directed to the polls, the statements from doctors and economists, if they just notice the response -- or lack of response -- to the Phelps and Holmes, to the athletes and celebrities who make an open secret of their marijuana use.  If they just notice that the public knows marijuana laws don't work -- and it doesn't bother them in the least that they don't until a friend, relative, or dealer gets caught.

The result will be an economic stimulus, and maybe the same 'feel good' stimulus that the repeal of the equally unworkable alcohol prohibition caused.  A lot of people who don't deserve to be in jail will be out, and others, who do deserve it, will no longer be able to use the congestions of courts and prisons to bargain down their time away from society.

[Btw, just because the first two posts I've made have been on the same subject, and that I'll be adding another on the similarity between 'decriminalization' and DADT doesn't mean this is the only topic I'll be discussing.  I can and will be writing about lots of things, from Her Excellency The Baroness Munchhausen, Governor of Alaska, to the problems with 'abstinence only' sex education -- now why do those two seem to go together.  From the trap Presidnt Obama set, how the Republicans walked into it, and how we can help keep them from crawling out, to the innocuously named and phrased, extremely dangerous "Parental Rights Amendment."]