Clear sunshine and a chilly breeze this Sunday morning on California’s north coast as the world starts a new week and a new month — both will have its share of bullshit.

In the last few hours/days, all kind of crazy, like President Obama backtracking again on Syria, calling on the US Congress to make the decision; or maybe the death of David Frost; Indian rapist/murderer gets only three years in jail;  men can be just as depressing as women; and then this: Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug used worldwide, but addictions to popular painkillers like Vicodin, Oxycontin and codeine kill the most people, according to the first-ever global survey of illicit drug abuse.

(Illustration found here).

One noted piece of nauseous shit in all of history is the lumping of marijuana into any “drug” category — until just way-recently, in a supposedly progressive White House administration, the hardshell case for marijuana is much-heavily reflected by this US House exchange last year between DEA honcho Michele Leonhart and Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado:

“Is crack worse for a person than marijuana?” Polis asked Leonhart.
“I believe all illegal drugs are bad,” Leonhart answered.
Polis continued, asking whether methamphetamines and heroin were worse for a person’s health than marijuana.
“Again, all drugs, they’re illegal drugs,” Leonhart started, before being cut off by Polis.
“Yes, no, or I don’t know?” Polis said.
“If you don’t know, you can look this up. You should know this as the chief administrator for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
I’m asking a very straightforward question: Is heroin worse for someone’s health than marijuana?”
Leonhart ducked again, repeating, “All illegal drugs are bad.”

Even at the time, when I first read about that total bullshit above, a hideous scream wanted to escape my face: WTF! Obama seems to be getting worse. He appears going well beyond just being way-disappointing, there’s indications of an actual ineptness, or maybe even a slow-motion incompetence.

Pot, and drugs in general, should have been a no-brainer. Not like the asshole shit from the asshole DEA.
Last Thursday, a step in the right direction, finally, and only after feeling the groundswell within the US general public — more than half of Americans now support decriminalization of marijuana and that total is growing — AG Eric Holder …informed the governors of Washington and Colorado that the Department of Justice would allow the states to create a regime that would regulate and implement the ballot initiatives that legalized the use of marijuana for adults (via HuffPost).

Holder and DOJ Deputy James Cole are scheduled to testify Sept. 10 at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on pot’s legal status — the jam-up of federal vs state laws on marijuana.

In early August, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN’s chief medical correspondent, sloshed around a little bong water when he strongly OKed medical marijuana, and was indeed sorry for all the previous bad shit he’d coughed up about pot (from CNN):

Well, I am here to apologize.
I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now.
I didn’t look far enough.
I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

But the shit is from history — last month 43 years ago, due to “…a considerable void in our knowledge of the plant and effects of the active drug contained in it,”  marijuana was made a schedule 1 substance, bad-illegal.
Gupta says, hey, that shit was way-wrong:

In 1944, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia commissioned research to be performed by the New York Academy of Science.
Among their conclusions: they found marijuana did not lead to significant addiction in the medical sense of the word.
They also did not find any evidence marijuana led to morphine, heroin or cocaine addiction.

And like a lot of shit we’ve seen recently, all those studies went out the window, or to the deep drawers of the government. Or the minds of the ignorant, like the Major County Sheriffs’ Association, the National Sheriffs’ Association, the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Narcotic Officers Associations’ Coalition, the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association and the Police Executive Research Forum, all who dribbled-out a strongly-worded letter strongly opposing Holder’s pot move.
And strong dumb-ass CYA:

Local law enforcement agencies rely heavily on the drug war for funding.
Police departments are often able to keep a large portion of the assets they seize during drug raids, even if charges are never brought.
And federal grants for drug war operations make up a sizable portion of local law enforcement funding.
The letter warns that marijuana can cause suicidal thoughts, impairs driving and is a “gateway drug.”
The missive does not, however, address the failure of law enforcement generally to reduce drug use, even while tripling the number of people behind bars.
Instead, the police warn that liberalizing pot laws will lead to an increase in crime.

Phoney baloney.