<p>NPR’s Planet Money podcast recently aired a program on the deficit and what average Americans think would be the best way to fix it by cutting only one thing. I don’t think that cutting just one thing would ever fix a problem so huge, but crowd-sourcing such an idea is not a new concept. Whitehouse.gov itself used this at one point, allowing users to ask the newly elected Obama a question in an open forum, even using the users to help police the question boards through a flagging procedure. The neat part about crowd-sourcing with limitations is that not only does it keep discussions rather more on track than an open forum, but it takes a small (minuscule in the grand scheme of things) step towards direct democracy which may or may not be a good thing, I really don’t know, but it sometimes feels like this could make things a little better.</p>
<p>One of the overwhelming questions on the whitehouse.gov forum was about legalization of marijuana. This issue has come up in my life three times now – the first was when I read Carl Sagan’s Contact way back when which featured a little vignette about marijuana being legalized and “this [being] deducted from your share in paradise”; the second was when I was on a bit of a spirituality/drugs/poetry kick and wound up reading Dale Pendell’s Pharamko/Poeia; and the third was when I recently finished with Michael Lewis’ The Big Short and got set off onto a financial kick. Since I finished The Big Short today and thus am still on said kick, I’ve been peeking into the issue of the financial implications of legalizing marijuana, but I’m having quite a hard time finding the information I need in the morass of data out there, little of which is readily available or easily searched.</p>
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<pstyle="border: 1px solid black; padding: 3px;"><strong>Originally published at <ahref="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/2010/09/07/the-outlaw-plant/">Drab Makyo</a>. Please leave any <ahref="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/2010/09/07/the-outlaw-plant/#comments">comments</a> there.</strong></p
