My final pre-blog blog entry: July 29, 1993

Here is the final blog entry from my pre-blog blogging thought experiment 20 years ago, before I knew blogging would ever exist. (read my first pre-blog blog blog here)

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Seven-year law-making/breaking

July 29, 1993

Someone made the mistake of asking me: Why is marijuana an illegal substance?

It is illegal because it was once made illegal, and once something is made illegal it becomes very difficult to make it legal again. This is because we hire law-makers and not law-breakers. It is their job to make laws, and they do their job very well. It is not until we start electing law-breakers that laws can be unmade.

It was relatively easy to make marijuana illegal, and I'm sure many posters can fill you in on the financial, racial, and political reasons why it was made illegal so long ago. Law books are crammed chock full of laws that have been made over the years, and the books get bigGer and bigger but never smaller. There are still abundant laws about where you can't graze your sheep and can't shoe your horse, where you can't spit and where you can't remove your shoes, where you can't keep your slaves, etc... Eventually every imaginable action will be against the law. However, it is only those laws that are enforced that affect us and that we seem to care about. It is already the case that a well-informed cop can almost certainly find some law you're breaking (a local policeman told me this was probably correct as he evicted me from a video store for attempting to rent a video tape while not wearing shoes).

Thomas Jefferson recommended that we have a new revolution every seven years. I think think that a revolution every seven years is going a bit too far. I think it's more reasonable that every law enacted become void after seven years. If it's a good law then the test of time will clearly have shown that it is good and so re-enactment will be simple. If it is a bad law then that too will be obvious. If it is questionable, then it would be up to its proponents show a convincing reason why this questionable law should be re-enacted.

This is what I think, and when the day comes that the world recognizes me as its natural leader, then this is how it will be. So there!