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"I judge weed by the company it keeps."

Dear War on Drugs,

Sorry, but we're just not that into you.

Over the last three years, federal anti-narcotics outfits funneled some $300,000 to various Utah law enforcement agencies to pay for their efforts to find and destroy crops of marijuana.

But, as revealed recently in The Salt Lake Tribune, they didn't find any to destroy. The agencies had the decency to give back, so far, half of the money they were paid to conduct their fruitless, er, seedless search.

It is difficult to believe that nobody is growing cannabis anywhere in Utah. It is more likely that our peace officers are finding better things to do. Because people who carry a badge aren't that different from the rest of us.

And the rest of us are realizing that the whole war on drugs was about the dumbest idea ever. Dumber, even, than the 1920s experiment banning alcohol, if only because Prohibition didn't last so long.

John Ehrlichman, one of President Nixon's top aides, claimed that his boss deliberately launched the War on Drugs 50 years ago as a weapon aimed at his two least favorite groups — blacks and long-haired liberals.

Even Nixon may not have been that devious. But there is serious scholarship suggesting that the American Civil Rights Movement hit a brick wall, and the nation's horrid move toward mass incarceration took off, as a result of the idiotic decision to apply a law enforcement solution to a public health problem.

TV's just-the-facts cop, quoted above, was among many who didn't see a difference — chemical, legal or moral — between marijuana and any number of nasty drugs such as LSD or heroin. He was right that they tended to all turn up in the same pockets, the same secret compartments of trucks that had just crossed the border, the same coroner's reports of accidental overdoses.

But that is because the law, not common sense, pushed them all into the same parts of town, the same car trunks, the same unconquerable black market economy.

Now, though, the face of marijuana is changing. Instead of Black Panthers and freaky hippies, people who benefit from marijuana or its extracts are small children with crippling epilepsy, veterans who have found no other remedy for the PTSD and Utah women who are desperate to ease the pain of degenerative back disorders.

That last category includes a woman whose only demographic red flag was that her husband is the Democratic candidate for governor in Utah, making his entire household suspect indeed. But instead of hauling her off to prison with the blacks and the Hispanics and the long-hairs, for the crime of mailing two pounds of grass to her own home, Donna Weinholtz was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor possession charge, pay a $3,800 fine and spend a year on probation.

Appearances matter. The epidemic of opioid addiction and death has been borne in the briefcases of those well-dressed pharmaceutical salespeople who are sitting next to you in the doctor's waiting room. But their respectability is falling fast, as their victims are also well-dressed white people.

And it is almost funny how the fight over the future of marijuana in America is becoming a battle of the suits. Those who will work the hardest to oppose making cannabis legally available are those who will lose market share — Big Pharma. And their lobbyists and allies are already describing those who favor medical cannabis as Big Marijuana, trying to use a little smoke-and-mirrors misdirection to make voters see the promoters of weed as the evil successors to Big Tobacco.

If there is any justice, we won't swallow that.

On Nov. 8, five states, including California and Arizona, will vote on legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use. (Four more states will vote on the question of medical cannabis.) If it passes everywhere, almost a quarter of the U.S. population will live in jurisdictions where marijuana is no longer a reason for chucking someone in jail.

And Utah politicians, who usually take great pride in telling the feds to stick it, will be sadly behind the curve. Wonder what they might use to ease their pain?

George Pyle is a Tribune editorial writer whose drugs of choice are caffeine and sugar.