Here's an interesting question: what would end the war on drugs? Is it something that can be made to happen by sane, enterprising individuals?
Aside from the occasional completely irrational commenter on DenverPost.com, most folks around here just don't give two shits about these dispensaries. Crime rates at these shops (as well as their warehouses where they grow their product) are lower than that of banks and pharmacies. Their security and ID-checking measures are all taken very seriously, you simply never hear about them letting in underage kids or folks without medicinal permits. All of the irrational fears of "dispensaries ruining neighborhoods" or "dispensaries selling marijuana to underage kids" simply have not materialized.
In regards to your question - most of these shops are owned by "sane, enterprising individuals" and not creepy street dealers. The culture of marijuana around here is NOTHING like it was back in the midwest. There is no paranoia, fear, or any of those weird dynamics that surround marijuana in non medicinal states -- people simply don't care. Smoke it if you want, get a medicinal card if you need it, but just keep it to yourself and there will be no problems.
THIS is how we defeat the war on drugs. There are people that will say medicinal marijuana laws are just a backdoor effort for full legalization .... and they're right. With decades of brainwashing from our very own government, it's going to take time and patience to change public opinion of marijuana. The best way to do this is to regulate the production and distribution of this plant (Colorado has some of the most progressive and proactive medicinal laws in the country, much more than even California) and to slowly expose the general population to it.
Ending the war on drugs isn't going to happen over night but we are certainly beginning to move in the right direction.
2) Silver bullet solutions? Yeah, I believe in them. And Santa, too.
It is not very difficult to convince Monsanto if they can make more money in some other way -- it may not be something that can be solved by gcc, but when has raw computer programming talent ever been the deciding factor for a computer programmer?
If it's not very difficult to convince Monsanto of this, then please do it right away, if it has the benefit of ending the war on drugs. If you can't be bothered to do it yourself, then pray tell us the 5 easy steps to convincing Monsanto to start exploiting Marijuana and therefore decriminalise all drugs.
Unless you think, as I do, that the above is a fantasy and has no practical value as a line of action.
Any hemp-based economy is a threat to centralized industrial concerns. With the invention of the hemp decorticator in the 1910's (the cotton gin of hemp) by George Schlichten, hemp's potential as an industrial crop to replace petroleum was unlocked.
Large, centralized industries have no interest in seeing their monopoly threatened.
Remember, hemp is illegal, not just marijuana.
Could you clarify this statement? Are you saying hemp can be efficiently used as a fuel?
Popular Mechanics was touting hemp in 1938:
http://www.globalhemp.com/1938/02/new-billion-dollar-crop.ht...
In this case, there would be money on both sides. The drug war itself is a massive industry at this point --- look at the power of prison guards in California. There are also a whole lot of politicians with a massive ego stake in the existing set of laws. And Monsanto, the tobacco companies, and agribusiness all have much easier and less stressful ways to preserve profits by lobbying. (Maintaining agricultural subsidies, for the first two, for starters.)
So, don't expect this to happen really soon.
What can sane, enterprising people do?
This strategy takes a long time, but there's empirical evidence that it actually works.
Organised religion fizzled away when faced with widespread access to the facts (though two world wars surely helped).
There seems to be a trend for humans becoming brighter and more socially connected. (See Pinker's decline of violence work.)
I'm making the assumption that those trends will also stamp out boneheadedness with regards to prohibition.
Where? That's certainly not the case in America; access to facts does nothing more than make believers even more devout.
Various primitive gods/spirits probably fitted the available facts pretty well at some point.
The educated middle class is perhaps outnumbered, but holds much power (ha like iOS vs Android) in that most teachers are educated middle class. And at least in the UK, teachers seem to be mostly areligious.
Lucky you.