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Editorial board of The New York Times calls for the legalization of weed

Editorial board of The New York Times calls for the legalization of weed

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While the full decriminalization of marijuana in the United States is far from guaranteed, momentum has been building at a fast clip in recent years: Colorado and Washington state have taken the lead, with medical marijuana now legal in nearly two dozen states in total. Now, the editorial board of The New York Times is calling for legalization with an opinion being published in tomorrow's edition. "We reached that conclusion after a great deal of discussion among the members of The Times's Editorial Board, inspired by a rapidly growing movement among the states to reform marijuana laws," it says. The piece — titled "Repeal Prohibition, Again" — compares the state of marijuana use in the US today to that of alcohol during the Prohibition of the 1920s, when laws served more to turn generally good people into criminals than to curb genuinely harmful behavior.

This year a number of states are voting on marijuana measures, and the opinion of the Times — which says it'll be running articles looking more closely at the issue — could certainly have an impact.