Hello!!!  It's still illegal to buy it or sell it or smoke it in public??  Then someone needs to fill me in on what the big change is.  Before now, how much actual enforcement was there of state pot laws when nothing was being bought or sold, and the joint puffing or bong sucking was going on in private?

If any of our readers has a specific, documented answer to that question, I'd be interested in knowing.  My strong intuition, from many years as a prosecutor, is that there was next to no enforcement in those circumstances, and everyone knew it.

Here's the truth that no one seems to want to speak:  Simple possession of user-only amounts of pot consumed in private was already de facto legal.  Yes, a law against it was on the books, and yes, a very, very few times someone might have gone to jail for its violation, but for any practical purpose, if you weren't dealing and you sat peaceably in your den toking up, absolutely nothing law enforcement-related was going to happen.

The legalization lobby is all giddy about what it claims was the start of the revolution. It was a victory, no doubt about that. But a revolution needs to consist of something more than what's been going on for years anyway.