Maybe, if you’re young and liberal or libertarian-inclined or even slightly conservative, you believe that there is such a consensus and that only the cowardice of our politicians or various powerful pro-prison industrial state interest groups prevents the sensible majority from achieving the self-evidently just goal of ending marijuana prohibition. But it’s far from clear that most Americans are actually anti-prohibition. The latest evidence isn’t very promising: A minority of Californians — 46 percent — support legalization, according to an L.A. Times poll. Fifty percent oppose it. Only 55 percent of people in the Bay Area support legalization. The split falls on predictable lines. Democrats, Independents and young people favor legalization. Republicans and old people don’t. (As they should: As we all know, frequent use of cannabis leads inexorably to dangerous experimentation with jazz music and other perversions.)

For many of the people who support it, it seems to be pretty soft support. What’s worse: “Those against marijuana use were more adamant in their position, with 42 percent feeling ‘strongly’ about it compared with 33 percent [of the] ‘for’ proponents.” That seems, initially, surprising — no one seems to really want marijuana illegal, right? — but maybe it shouldn’t be. For your typical white liberal, marijuana is easy to get (especially in California!), and the chance of being imprisoned for casual use is negligible. So, it’s very easy to believe that a sort of decriminalization has already happened.

As Lucy Steigerwald writes at Reason Magazine’s Hit & Run: “It’s still surprising that California cannot either legalize gay marriage or marijuana, two theoretically leftish causes that most libertarians can also get behind.”

The comparison is apt: They’re both issues that have recently seen national support rise to around 50 percent in polls, and they’re both issues that have thus far failed every time they’ve been up for a referendum.

I’m guessing that a not insignificant number of people who oppose marijuana legalization are supporters of President Obama. I also assume that a (probably larger) number of people who are broadly sympathetic to marijuana legalization but not particularly energized by the issue would be more inclined to care about the issue if the president highlighted it. Would this be an issue in which the much derided bully pulpit could actually be used to sway public opinion enough to lead to actual reform?

I basically agree with “bully pulpit” skeptics: I think when the president takes a position on an issue that was not formerly particularly “partisan,” it creates partisan opposition to his position. President Obama coming out in favor of drug legalization could cause Republicans — a small number of whom have lately been sounding marginally more reasonable on the issue — to fall back in love with the drug war. But if Obama’s support for gay marriage led to the crumbling of apparently weak black opposition, as it appears to have done in Maryland, it would likely have a similar effect if he ever actually voiced support for the legalization of a harmless drug he enjoyed himself on many occasions with no adverse consequences.

The problem, obviously, is that we have no evidence that Obama actually supports legalization. Obama was for decriminalization, but not legalization, in 2004 — and that is the only hint of “secret reasonableness” on the issue. It’s much less of a wink-nudge than we got on gay marriage, with his promised “evolution.” (To be cynical about it, there’s no marijuana equivalent of the gay fundraising network.)

While he talked up decriminalization and (heavily regulated) medicinal marijuana before, now Obama’s Justice Department rather zealously enforces prohibition. (Another gay marriage parallel: His administration stopped defending DOMA in court long before his evolution finished.)

Obama has thus far signaled that marijuana is not an important issue. It is a silly sideshow for Ron Paul freaks, basically, to be laughed about when the kids ask him serious questions on the subject. Meanwhile, marijuana possession arrests rise nearly every year. Thousands of people — primarily young, black males — are arrested and introduced to the criminal justice system in New York and other cities for the crime of possessing small amounts of a drug that the more affluent enjoy with few repercussions. (Some, like “reasonable Republican” David Frum, see that as a good thing — it deters those with “the least social resources” from drug use, apparently.)

And of course, marijuana provides a substantial portion of the income of the cartels currently terrorizing Mexico. (No one knows how much, but estimates of the percentage of Mexican gang revenue derived from marijuana export range from 15 to as high as 60.) It’s reductive and false to say legalizing marijuana would cripple the cartels, just as it’s silly to claim that taxing weed is the secret to fixing California’s finances, but legalization would mean that casual American users would no longer be actively financing murder when they simply wanted to get high. (Obviously if we really want to deprive the cartels of revenue, we’d legalize cocaine. But that one is … a bit of a long shot.)

The president’s “signalling” could work on other elites, too. Legalization would immediately cease being a “fringe issue” in the eyes of the mainstream press, and other major liberal and Democratic political figures presumably would feel more comfortable bucking the drug war status quo. (I bet Mayor Bloomberg would say he’s always favored legalization, yet another reason he’s simply too sensible and rational to ever be president.) I think the result might be similar to the gay marriage battle, where the compromise of civil unions (in this case, decriminalization) gave way surprisingly quickly to actual victories for marriage. Because “decriminalization,” in this case, wouldn’t solve the problem of where the weed is coming from and whom its sale is enriching. Then again, perhaps nothing would happen save that Republicans would tar the president as a drug-addled radical.

Unfortunately we probably won’t find out soon, if ever. The president seems, constitutionally, to be extraordinarily cautious when it comes to advocating liberal causes, even ones that are actually supported by approximately half of the country. (To borrow a phrase, let me be clear: No one here is pretending that the president “secretly” supports some liberal fantasy proposal — merely wishing he actually would support it.) So, I guess what we should hope for is another legalization referendum happening around an occasion when Vice President Biden is booked on a Sunday show.

As I lay there in bed night after night praying that sealed doors and windows would at least contain the eau de cannabis indoors and not alert the neighbors to what I was up to, I inevitably questioned my wisdom. I’m not a drug dealer or suffering from some crippling illness. I don’t even smoke marijuana for fun; if I did, I’d at least have a better excuse for subjecting not only myself but my wife and son to the stress of running a clandestine suburban marijuana farm.

I’m just an author whose idea to research and write about medical marijuana laws and the legalization debate through hands-on experience seemed damned near genius when I concocted it in late 2009, while watching an episode of “Weeds.” That looks subversively fun, I thought. And profitable. And hey, I live in Colorado, one of what was at the time 13 states to approve medical marijuana use. Writing about this law and all of its attendant controversies — is it just a ploy by clever potheads to give legal cover to perfectly healthy stoners, or was there something to the whole medical benefits argument? — through complete immersion was a no-brainer. I’d be the A.J. Jacobs of pot and have far more fun than he had: Would you rather try to abide by the dictates of the Bible for a year or grow some weed and try to abide by your state’s medical marijuana laws?

Diving into the deep end of a subject is nothing new for me, even if it means breaking the law. I once tried to smuggle a diamond out of West Africa while researching diamond smuggling for “Blood Diamonds” (the rough diamond I bought on the black market in Freetown, it turned out, was a fake, but I didn’t know that until I got to the United States). I learned how to pick locks for “Flawless,” a book about a diamond heist, and I even snuck myself into the vault that was robbed so I could see what it was like. Compared to those minor crimes committed in my dedication to research, what was growing a little pot?

A lot more than I’d bargained for, as it turned out. First of all, it’s no minor crime. It’s a federal felony to grow even a single marijuana plant, with a minimum fine of $250,000 and a minimum five-year prison sentence. This is true whether you’re growing to alleviate the symptoms of chemotherapy, to get stoned watching “South Park” or for journalistic research. I knew this going in, of course, and figured that with so many people growing marijuana in Colorado at the time — in late 2009, in the wake of the Ogden memo, which signaled that the feds were going to leave state-sanctioned medical marijuana users and their suppliers alone, you were hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t at least considering the idea — there would be safety in numbers.

While this turned out to be generally true, there were a number of worrisome developments once my plans were too far along to stop, primarily a steady stream of arrests and DEA raids on people using the medical marijuana law. The most high-profile was the case of Chris Bartkowicz, a suburban grower in nearby Denver, who was raided by the DEA and busted for growing more than 200 plants. He came to the attention of the DEA by going on the nightly news — using his real name and not bothering to obscure his face — to boast about his grow operation, an unfortunate decision compounded by the fact that his house was located within 1,000 feet of an elementary school, an automatic sentence enhancement.

I had no plans to even remotely follow his example. Once I qualified as a medical marijuana patient (with the help of a doctor whose definition of “severe pain” helpfully included my complaints about a sore back) I would only be growing six plants, the maximum allowed under state law for individual patients. My home is half a mile from the nearest school. And I obviously didn’t intend to issue a press release to the TV stations about my little project

But still. Bartkowicz faced 40 years in prison (he took a plea bargain and will serve five). I was fairly certain that the DEA wouldn’t waste its time taking down such a small-timer like me, but once the pot began to bloom in the basement and become fragrant, even I started to wonder if they’d somehow multiplied from six into 600. A Catch-22 of the state medical marijuana law is that the only way you can prove you’re in compliance with it is after you’ve been busted. If it’s the DEA that does the busting, whether you’re toeing the line or not is immaterial — federal law trumps state law.

The slamming doors in the night turned out to be nothing, of course. Just some neighbors coming home from a late dinner. Is this really worth it? I asked myself, crouched in my underwear and peering through the curtains.

The answer was yes, and for a most unexpected reason. Before this experiment, I was perfectly ambiguous about whether marijuana was legal or not. I wasn’t opposed to recreational smoking but because I don’t use it myself, I haven’t felt much enthusiasm to agitate for its legalization. If you’d pressed me, I would agree that the expense of enforcing its total prohibition — an expense borne not just by taxpayers, to the tune of some $13 billion annually, but also by those who are busted and face personal and financial ruin — makes little sense, but also that there are more pressing issues to deal with. And like many who haven’t given the matter much thought, I had some skepticism about its purported medical benefits. Without a pressing medical need prompting me to find out for myself, I was happy to let more interested parties hash it out.

What propelled me into the debate was the outrage medical marijuana laws had generated, not just in Colorado but across the country. The often ill-considered over-reaching by marijuana proponents — for many reasonable people who are undecided about pot, garish dispensaries blazing neon pot leaves from their local strip malls feel like being given the finger — was nothing compared to the militaristic hysteria unleashed by the federal government. Cops were busting into homes and blowing away the family pets looking for reefer and in many cases, turning up next to nothing. Perfectly sober businesses (to speak in relative terms) that followed the letter of their state laws were being pulverized under the heels of DEA agents. Although my personal experiences with marijuana are limited (and well in the past), I knew enough about the effects of pot to realize that the governmental reaction was far out of proportion to the actual threat.

That perception became sharply focused the more I learned about marijuana’s potential as a valid therapeutic tool in treating everything from cancer to nausea. The government’s rabid insistence that medical marijuana is as real as the tooth fairy is simply wrong. The National Institute of Cancer sees promise in its ability to attack tumors. It’s been known for decades to battle chemo-induced nausea better than oral drugs that have the obvious drawback of being vomited up before they can take effect. MS patients have used it to ease the spasticity in their muscles. Cannabinoids — marijuana’s unique ingredients that interact with specific receptors in the brain — have anti-inflammatory effects and can relieve pain. Importantly, cannabinoid receptors aren’t found in the parts of the brain that regulate breathing, which could be one of the reasons no one has ever died of an overdose, making marijuana safer than many foods we eat.

Delving further, I found that one of my own relatives, a cousin who had lost a battle with mesothelioma, had used marijuana to cope with chemotherapy. She lived in New York, where her caring friends and family members had no choice but to deal in the criminal underground to get it, while in nearly a third of the states (most of them in the West) patients could shop with dignity at their choice of dispensaries. That perfectly healthy people who’ve faked their way into the system can do so too is — to me, at least — a small price to pay for those patients to safely obtain the relief they need. It’s certainly not an abomination worthy of the crackdown that has resulted.

Medical marijuana laws are not perfect. They can indeed be easy for healthy people to abuse. Without the involvement of regulators early in the process of developing systems for sale and distribution, which requires a state government more willing to address the issue than simply by plugging its ears and covering its eyes, hoping it will go away, chaos can result. Cops and politicians are going gray overnight with impotence and confusion, usually causing them to overreact and unleash the hounds. Chronically strait-laced citizens who will never believe anyone but the government on this issue see them as evidence of moral meltdown.

But one of the unintended consequences of these laws is that it forces more reasonable folks who might never have given much thought to the issue of medical marijuana — people like me, in other words — to take the effort to sort through the hype. It sounds trite to herald my enlightenment as something newsworthy when so many have figured out long ago what an indefensible failure the war on marijuana has been and that it’s morally repugnant to continue it in the face of mounting evidence of its credibility as a medical substance. But the truth is, without medical marijuana laws and all of their attendant upheaval, I never would have been interested enough to grow my own and embark on my own process of discovery. I may never have seen the light.

In that regard, federal drug cultivation laws were the best ones I’ve ever broken.

The U.S. government says it will listen, but will not bend.

Some Latin leaders are discussing the need to experiment further with decriminalizing possession of drugs. Lawmakers are also proposing to scrap jail terms for growing coca and cannabis.

The bottom line: Softening anti-drug laws would ultimately drive down narcotics prices, advocates say, and that would crimp revenues for the deadly cartels that wreak havoc from the Andes to Mexico — and across its U.S. border.

Though far from concrete, the push comes as Latin leaders flex their might and independent voices as Washington’s influence wanes in the Americas. What’s more, some of the United States’ closest allies — moderates and conservatives alike — are leading the charge toward change.

Ethan Nadelmann is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based independent research and advocacy group, and has advised Latin American leaders on this bold policy rethink. GlobalPost caught up with him during his recent visit to a conference at Brown University.

GlobalPost: Why that racket on legalizing drugs in Latin America?

Ethan Nadelmann: What’s emerged is a critical mass of support for opening up the debate and putting all options on the table. And all options include decriminalization, legal regulation and other alternatives to the drug war.

Why now?

One [factor] is the ongoing and mounting frustration that not just governments but many people in Latin America feel with the negative consequences of the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America. Many have concluded that there’s no way to defeat what is essentially a dynamic global commodities market. … Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin — they are global commodities markets much in the same way that alcohol, tobacco, sugar or coffee are. So long as there is a demand, especially a significant demand in a country like the United States, there will be a supply. The demand is growing worldwide in many respects.

What stands out among the consequences of the drug war?

The escalating violence in Mexico. [President Felipe] Calderon’s attempt to take on the criminal organizations. The 50,000 dead. The spread of this traffic and violence to Central America. The widespread realization that it’s only a matter of time before it floods into the Caribbean, once again, as it did back in the ‘80s.

How has the debate been shaping up?

You now have [Colombian] President Juan Manuel Santos who has, in a very cautious way, been very strategic in speaking out a bit more, looking for other allies. You have President Calderon who’s been frustrated in his relationship with the United States on this area. He came to the U.S. last year and began to say that the U.S. should look at “market alternatives” if they were unable to reduce the demand.

You’ve had some growing movement of decriminalization of [drug] possession in countries from Mexico to Colombia to Ecuador to Brazil to Argentina.

You also have, in the last few years, the rapid growth of the drug-policy movement, activist groups like we have in the US, also spreading around Latin America.

And then you have the thing that finally clinched it, when President Otto Perez Molina [of Guatemala] decided shortly after he entered office to make this a priority. That really was a transformative moment. He emerged as the ally that President Santos in Colombia had been looking for.

So that wasn’t just political posturing?

Initially people were suspect about [Perez’s] motives, but it became apparent that he was serious about this, engaging it for substantive reasons and he began to clearly show a commitment on this issue and to educate himself more deeply. And then he began to make a more active effort to interact with other Central American leaders, and to interact with Santos, Calderon and the others. That is what enabled this critical mass to emerge.

These are bold proposals. Has it helped that Washington’s dominance seems to have waned in the region?

The sense of fear and intimidation that many of these governments feel regarding the United States has diminished. There’s a growing sense of independence and willingness to speak their mind and not be so under the thumb of the U.S. government as they were in the past. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia … many of these countries have booming economies, there’s a greater sense of independence.

Are these leaders just talking about decriminalizing marijuana possession, or something else?

They’re putting forward different ideas about how you deal with bigger problems of the large-scale production and trafficking of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. If you look at the spectrum you’ll have somebody like former President of Mexico Vicente Fox saying clearly the time has come to legalize all of it. You’ll have somebody like [Colombia’s] Santos giving an interview to the Guardian saying legalize cannabis, and maybe cocaine too — but he’s just kind of floating an idea.

Is this the first time we’re hearing “legalize it” from Latin America?

This debate has been bungling around for many years. And over the years, more and more people have been exposed to the arguments regarding the failures of a prohibitionist drug-control policy and the potential benefits of an alternative.

The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy — chaired by former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso [of Brazil], Cesar Gaviria [of Colombia] and Ernesto Zedillo [of Mexico] — released its report in early 2009 and that was really a breakthrough. These were three distinguished presidents all from the center, center-right of the political spectrum, joined by many other prominent ministers and intellectuals and publishers, saying we need to move in a new direction, we need to break the taboo, to understand the European harm-reduction approach better, to move in a direction of decriminalization of cannabis. That planted a lot of seeds in Latin America.

That was followed up by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which issued its report in June of last year. It was not just presidents. They also had former Secretary of State George Shultz, [ex-chair of the Federal Reserve] Paul Volcker, Kofi Annan, [Virgin entrepreneur] Richard Branson and a whole range of distinguished people. That report went a step further. They talked about experiments in legal regulation of cannabis, a whole range of other innovative strategies. You had … distinguished folks legitimizing this thing.

Did you work on those reports?

I was an adviser to both.

How far has this debate come today?

For most of [the leaders involved], including Santos and Perez Molina, right now it’s more about sparking a discussion. It’s about saying ‘we spent the last 20, 30, 40 years experimenting with different drug war options — interdiction efforts, law enforcement strategies — and look at the mess we have today. We need to systematically look at the alternatives. We need to have government officials interacting with experts in public health, criminal justice and economics.’

There’s a growing consensus that the movement toward legal regulation of cannabis is perhaps inevitable and certainly the right thing to do. There’s also an emerging consensus that the personal possession of smaller amounts of any drug should be decriminalized. That’s important because [criminalizing possession] basically results in the arrest and incarceration of large numbers of people who are mostly poor and of darker skin.

It’s not that they’re saying legalize drugs tomorrow, it’s the provocative sort of statement that gets people paying attention, and realizing that we better start talking about this in earnest.

It is the anti-prohibition campaign of Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, one a former general, the other a former defense minister, that has forced the Obama administration to engage critics respectfully for the first time. Perez will be pushing a formal proposal to open discussion of alternative policies at the summit of American heads of state that President Obama is attending, in Cartagena, Colombia this weekend.

While Obama doesn’t support decriminalization, said his advisor Dan Restrepo this week, “we welcome” the debate. “It’s worth discussing,” Vice President Biden told reporters in Central America last month, “but there’s no possibility the Obama-Biden administration will change its policy on legalization.”

So while there’s no change of heart in Washington, there has been a change of tone. The Obama administration cannot afford to blow off the views of two staunch U.S. allies who have both waged drug wars in their countries, not at a time when public opinion in Latin America is increasingly disenchanted with the militarized approach.

Their approach is tactful. Santos says he doesn’t want to change U.S. policy, but merely hear U.S. officials defend it.

“There are good arguments for legalizing, but I would prefer to reach that conclusion after an objective discussion,” Santos told the Washington Post this week. “The U.S. says, ‘We don’t support legalization, because the cost of legalization is higher than no legalization.’ But I want to see a discussion where both approaches are analyzed by experts to say, really, the cost is lower or not.”

In a piece for the Guardian, Perez called for an “intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach – drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that consumption and production should be legalized but within certain limits and conditions … Legalization therefore does not mean liberalization without controls.”

Perez and Santos may not make headlines in Cartagena this weekend. In an effort to lower expectations and avoid confrontation with Obama, Santos told reporters in Cartagena yesterday that drugs should not be the “center of discussion” at the summit. At the same time, he added, a review of drug policy was necessary and reflected the will of the “vast majority” of countries in attendance.

“We will not see any shift in policy,” said Juan Carlos Hidalgo of the Cato Foundation, “but this is forcing Washington to engage and defend its position at high levels.”

“In the public forum, ending prohibition will probably only get a brief discussion,” predicted Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Privately it will be much more vigorously discussed. The challenge for the United States will be how to blur the differences. This is the first time ever that the decriminalization and alternatives to prohibition have ever been on the agenda of a major gathering of heads of states.”

Perez and Santos are still in the minority among Latin American presidents, most of whom say, at least publicly, that they oppose legalization. But the desire for alternatives to legalization and prohibition is widespread. In Mexico, President Felipe Calderon has followed the U.S. approach in declaring war on the cartels in 2006. Some 41,000 people have been killed in the last six years without reducing the supply of drugs or increasing the public’s sense of safety.  Calderon has said legalization might be the only solution but with the Mexican presidential election approaching in July is not going to change his policy. After the election is a different story. The Mexican business community is increasingly supportive of legalization and regulation as the only solution to the country’s appalling levels of violence.

As the calls for reconsideration of drug war have proliferated, the Obama administration sent Biden, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs William Brownfield to Central America to argue for a prohibitionist policy.

“To send three top officials in a month shows that the administration is taking this seriously,” said Hidalgo. “They don’t want this debate to gain ground.”

But the more the administration responds in Latin America, the more legitimate drug policy reform becomes at home.

In Boulder, Colo., for example, the Daily Camera reports that “the University of Colorado announced a new plan to snuff out the Boulder campus’s 4/20 smoke-out, warning that police will ticket pot smokers at this month’s event.” In a state whose police forces have faced serious budget cuts, this decision clearly reflects a hardcore War on Drugs ideology by removing finite police resources from safety and security operations and instead focusing them on punishing pot use.

That’s a key point: Focusing police resources on safety is distinctly different than focusing them on the drug war. As the Camera notes, the new policy is “a more aggressive enforcement tactic than in years past, when officers mostly monitored the crowd for safety reasons.” Underscoring that point, notice that one day after the CU announcement, the same newspaper reported that the area near the university campus is experiencing an intense wave of burglaries. Rather than announce a serious crackdown on that crime wave, though, the university is choosing to spend taxpayers’ limited police resources on stopping pot smokers.

Back on the East Coast, there’s a similar trend. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi reports on new evidence that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has not only used CIA tactics to target ethnic communities, but also marshaled his massive police force to expand the so-called “Clean Halls program” in which police enter private apartment buildings to conduct preemptive surveillance. Coupled with Bloomberg’s expansion of racially charged “stop and frisks” aimed almost exclusively at prosecuting minorities who smoke weed, the “Clean Halls” program looks like yet another instrument of the War on Drugs.

As Taibbi says, this is not just a problem for the people being harassed by Bloomberg’s storm troopers, but for all Americans, because it takes finite law-enforcement resources away from fighting crime in other parts of New York — specifically, on Wall Street:

We have two definitely connected phenomena, often treated as separate and unconnected: a growing lawlessness in the financial sector, and an expanding, repressive, increasingly lunatic police apparatus trained at the poor, and especially the nonwhite poor. In recent years, as Wall Street firms turned into veritable felony factories, we had pundits and politicians who cranked out reams of excuses for one white-collar criminal after another and argued, in complete seriousness, that sending a rich banker to jail “wouldn’t solve anything” and in fact we should “tolerate the excesses” of the productive rich, who “channel opportunity” to the rest of us. On the other hand, we’ve had politicians and pundits in budget fights and other controversies railing against the parasitic poor, who are not only not “productive” enough to warrant a break, but assumed to be actively unproductive (they consume our tax money and public services) and therefore sort of guilty in advance.

Finally, there was Oakland, Calif. — one of the most blatant examples of how resources fueling the drug war could have been used to try to prevent a tragedy. Recounting two near-simultaneous events in the city last week, retired police officer Neill Franklin relates how law enforcement officials were swarming to crush medical marijuana oulets at the very moment innocent civilians were gunned down on Oikos University’s campus only a few blocks away:

As I sit and watch video after video of Monday’s senseless federal raid of Oaksterdam University and other medical cannabis-related facilities managed by Richard Lee, the orchestrator of California’s historic Proposition 19, a few serious concerns come to mind.

I noticed agents from at least three federal agencies: the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Internal Revenue Service. I’m not talking about two agents here and a couple more there. There were several dozen federal agents spending their day on the scene.

Meanwhile, just blocks away, a deadly shooting was taking place. While federal agents were using a battering ram, a sledgehammer and power saws to break into a business that complies with state and local law and pays taxes, a gunman was murdering seven people at Oikos University, just three-tenths of a mile away.

Obviously, nobody can say the shooting could have been prevented. But it’s fair to say there would have been at least a better chance of that tragedy being averted had our government devoted the same resources to community security that it devoted to pulverizing medical marijuana facilities.

What’s particularly horrifying about each of last week’s examples is how they show the drug war intensifying even as the public’s support for that war precipitously declines.

In Boulder, the university is conducting its crackdown in a state where the majority of citizens voted to legalize medical marijuana and now, according to polls, a near majority support legalizing pot for everyone. Shocking as it is, such defiance of the public will is now the norm in Colorado. Here, state Attorney General John Suthers has backed federal raids on medical marijuana facilities despite the state’s vote on the matter and despite his incessant paeans to “states’ rights.” Meanwhile, the Denver police force has openly defied voter mandates to make pot arrests the lowest priority.

The same goes for New York — in a state where polls show strong support for some form of marijuana legalization, the Guardian reports that police officers are nonetheless ignoring orders from superiors to reduce arrests of those possessing small amounts of marijuana.

At the federal level, this hostility to public opinion is most overt. The Obama administration has ignored the president’s campaign pledges and initiated a new round of marijuana raids at the very moment Gallup finds that a majority of Americans support the effort to fully legalize pot. Additionally, at the same time the administration is decrying budget deficits, the White House is pushing for a big increase in drug war funding, specifically preserving funding formulas that send far more money to the war’s militaristic endeavors (interdiction, law enforcement activities, etc.) than to more humane harm-reduction and treatment programs.

Put it all together and we see that the ascendant concept of an “era of persistent conflict” (read: permanent war) is not limited to our foreign occupations. Right here at home, governments at every level are waging a never-ending war without regard for — and often in brazen defiance of — what their constituents want.

Sure, pretending that only harms those directly ensnared in the combat may be vaguely comforting — but as last week proved, that’s a fantasy in the age of finite resources.

Bennett knows plenty about drugs — and the ravages of addiction. He’s been upfront in the past about his own experience with drug abuse and his near fatal 1979 overdose on cocaine. In his 1998 memoir, “The Good Life,” he wrote of passing out in a bathtub, an eerie foreshadowing of the discovery of Houston’s body in her hotel tub. And on Sunday, he shared a Grammy win with the late Amy Winehouse for a duet on “Body and Soul.”

Back in September, Bennett said that Winehouse “knew that she was in a lot of trouble” and “that she wasn’t going to live.” After taking the stage with Winehouse’s parents Sunday night, the 85-year-old Bennett told Rolling Stone that drug legalization would “get rid of all the gangsters that make people hide. One thing I’ve learned about young people, when you say ‘Don’t do this,’ that’s the one thing they’re going to try and do. Once it’s legal and everybody can do it, there is no longer the desire to do something that nobody else can do … I witnessed that in Amsterdam. It’s legal, and as a result there’s no panic in the streets. There’s no deals, there’s no ‘Meet me at the corner and I’ll give you something.’ You’re always afraid you’re going to get arrested. You have to hide. Why do that?”

You don’t have to be Zach Galifianakis to know that America’s 40-year war on drugs is a joke. Or as the Global Commission on Drug Policy called it last year, a flat-out failure, one with “devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” Arrests for nonviolent possession offenses continue to rise, disproportionately targeting minorities and creating a booming prison population. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Between 2000 and 2007, drug offenders represented 45 percent of the growth in the federal prison population.” Meanwhile, even the president of the United States can acknowledge, “I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”

But talking about drugs – and how we as individuals and a society handle them – can’t be managed with a simple “It’s all good.” To do so ignores not only the enormity and unmanageability of the international trade but the complexities of consumption. Smoking weed and running a meth lab out of your basement aren’t exactly the same things. We can’t just make blanket statements about “drugs” as if they’re all the same, not in a culture where we still expect limits on environmental toxins. And if you’ve ever wandered into a circle of thuggish, hooker-seeking British tourists in Amsterdam on a summer weekend, it’s worth asking – Hey, Tony Bennett, is this really the greatest argument we’ve got for how great legalization is?

Yet what really muddles the waters is the examples Bennett used, of Michael Jackson and his friend Amy Winehouse. The claim that “Once it’s legal and everybody can do it” problems go away is sadly untrue. Michael Jackson didn’t meet his maker shooting heroin into his veins; he died of “Acute Propofol Intoxication” — and his doctor, Conrad Murray, was subsequently convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Other drugs found in Jackson’s system at the time of his death were the FDA-approved Lorazepam, Lidocaine, Diazepam and Midazolam. Winehouse, meanwhile, died of alcohol poisoning.

Houston was no stranger to the illicit. In 2009, she admitted doing “heavy drugs, every day,” including cocaine, to Oprah Winfrey. But the investigation into her death so far has focused on prescription medications. A plea for a saner approach to our misguided, punitive drug war is a valid one to make. But accessibility doesn’t cure the problem of abuse. And as Dylan Thomas, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jackson, Winehouse — and quite possibly Whitney Houston — discovered, you can die just fine without breaking any drug laws.