I think anyone over the age of 20 who smokes marijuana is juvenile. It's wrong and, except for legitimate medical reasons, the stuff should not be touched. I also don't understand the appeal of Spanish Tapas restaurants, hip hop, flavored vodka and Abercrombie & Fitch clothing. I also believe all of the above -- including Mary Jane -- should be perfectly legal. Mere taste should not be institutionalized in the law.

I'm a conservative and a believer in traditional values. Traditionally, marijuana/hemp was cultivated and used for many purposes, including intoxicant. To me, as a traditionalist conservative, that means the bar is awfully high to establish why something that was lawful for thousands of year should suddenly be verboten. I've yet to see a convincing argument.

The usual response? Gateway drug. And that's the most simplistic fallacy of them all: correlation is not causation. I'm sure 99.9 percent of all crackheads and heroin addicts drank cow's milk as kids. They may have drunk beer. They definitely ate Oreo cookies within a few years of first shooting up. Yet marijuana is the only one illegal. Makes no sense.

Return to traditional values. It's usually a good solution to life's problems.

What I've never understood about marijuana (and other drug) prohibition is why it took a constitutional amendment to give the federal government the power to ban alcohol, but the feds had a free hand to ban other drugs simply by legislation. As a matter of law, it doesn't make sense.

As for the Ninth Amendment, my political fantasy is just one supreme court justice who pays attention to it.

Presuming, Mr. Henderson, that your question is not rhetorical, the answer as to why it took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol but not marijuana and other drugs is simple. When the 18th amendment was passed in 1919, instituting Prohibition, the Supreme Court and all of the branches of government still believed in the concept of federalism and a federal government of limited powers. Then came FDR, the New Deal, and unconstrained federal governmental power. On the one hand, you got the TVA; on the other, the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. It all culminated in the notorious 1942 Supreme Court decision in Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Court ruled that wheat grown on a family farm for a family's own consumption was "interstate commerce" and thus subject to federal regulation. If your family garden could be regulated by the feds, so too could marijuana, cocaine and all the rest. You could regulate drug use under the commerce clause, and not the roundabout method of tax policy.

And that's how the edifice of limited federal powers under the U.S. Constitution was destroyed, brick by brick.