When business magazines hop aboard the marijuana bandwagon, you know change can't be far behind. Roger Parloff's 7,500-word feature story "Is Pot Already Legal" in Fortune with Weeds star and Top CelebStoner Mary-Louise Parker on the cover is both striking and, well, fortuitous.

Parloff interviews the usual subjects in his tome about California's medical-marijuana industry: NORML's Keith Stroup and Allen St. Pierre, the DPA's Ethan Nadelmann and Bill Piper, Harvard's Lester Grinspoon and Jeff Miron, dispensary owners Steve DeAngelo (Harborside Health Center) and JoAnna LaForce (The Farmacy), Oaksterdam University's Richard Lee, medipot patient Irvin Rosenfeld, former NORML head Dick Cowan and lawyer Bill Panzer.

Here are some highlights:

• This is the sense in which President Obama's understated pledge not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws potentially achieves for that intoxicant what the Twenty-First Amendment accomplished for beer, wine and booze during the Great Depression.

• There is a perception that after 40 years of blood, sweat, and tears, the war on drugs - formally declared by President Richard Nixon in 1969, a month before the Woodstock festival - has failed to reduce the availability of illegal drugs, has enriched and empowered organized-crime gangs, and has subjected millions of people to arrest who pose little threat to anyone but themselves.

• We're now mired in the worst economic environment since the Great Depression, which makes the prospect of collecting taxes on marijuana sales as alluring to contemporary politicians as beer, wine, and liquor taxes looked to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his party when they took office in 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed.

* We're still awaiting hard proof that smoking marijuana can actually cause lung cancer. That evidence has proved surprisingly elusive, maybe in part because typical marijuana users smoke so much less than typical tobacco smokers.

• "I think the next five or six years are going to be incredibly exciting for this issue," says Stroup, who founded the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws 39 years ago. "I honestly believe we'll stop arresting individual smokers in almost all states and start to see the first one or two states experiment with a legalization bill."

St. Pierre has the funniest quote when he says about California's lax regs for receiving a medijuana recommendation: "You could get it for writer's block."

Interestingly, Parker only appears on the cover and Weeds is not even mentioned in the article. The pot-leaf on her chest looks like it was Photoshopped.

The story appears in the Sept. 28 issue. Link to the story here


Also see:

Weeds Season 5 Recap
More CelebStoner Reviews
More Top CelebStoners
CelebStoner News