WEED Inc.: When corporate evil gets high.

"WEED: American owned and grown since 2009" or

"WEED: The best dime at the best price, now available at Wal-Mart"

Target: Any American who has smoked pot from the terrified pre-teens with connections that smoked it once and spent most of their time coughing up their lungs to the adults-who-don't-give-a-damn-that-its-illegal and have waked-and-baked since they were thirteen and everybody in between.

Disclaimer: I am in all ways tolerant of smoking pot so don't worry! Just keep this scenario in mind when a vote inevitably comes around that could legalize it.

Tomorrow, in a surprise decision and questionable political move, President Obama decides to completely legalize the production, sale and use of marijuana in America effective immediately (bare with me, the rest is more possible). The President's opponents are livid and Nixon rolls over in his grave but millions of Americans call in sick and December 16th becomes the new 4/20 (and next April, most companies just give up and close for the day--fast food chains and grocers are the sole exception). All in all, the day goes down in history.

A year passes. Within that year a young woman named Mary Jane (because I'm trying to make a point, I don't have to be creative) sees dollar signs a mile high. By 12/25/2009, WEED Inc. is formed. She has the legal rights to the name (important! brand loyalty built in from decades), a huge start up loan and a fuck-ton of land in whatever state is most conducive to growing pot. On 3/20 WEED hits the shelves of retailers nationwide after three months of viral advertisement, moving in on as many markets as possible by starting in the center of every major city and spreading outward from there, and most importantly, growing a metric ass-ton of marijuana; within three months the it has become the number one crop in the country. Mary has made sales goals at every turn.

On April 15th, WEED Inc. and Wal-Mart announce a multi-million dollar deal that makes WEED the only marijuana sold in Wal-Marts across the country. Finally, pot is made available to every American over the age of 18 in beautiful packaging from behind the counter at every Wal-Mart in the country.

Two more years pass, Obama is re-elected by a land-slide (his opponent ran on a platform of returning to American values and waging the seemingly lost war on drugs: it didn't work). But the war on drugs hasn't been lost, it just isn't a problem anymore. Tentative studies from the United States Office on Drugs and Crime suggest that the sale and use of all hard drugs has declined dramatically. The arrest rate for distribution of heroine alone has dropped 65 percent. Over-crowding in jails has become a problem of the past. The authors of the gateway drug theory are publicly ridiculed on a constant basis. Crime in general has fallen. A recent Reuters polls suggests that general happiness has increased by 55 percent, job satisfaction by 85.

And poverty in America has reached record levels. Karl Marx rises from the dead out of pure spite at the unparalleled gap between the rich and the poor. The economy as a whole rides on the diminishing middle class and the super rich while the percentage of employed people in poverty has quadrupled. After three years of a satisfied high the political activists who four years earlier fought equally hard for legalization of marijuana as they did for the restriction and control of corporate greed and power hungriness wake up. WEED possesses absolute control over the drug market in America. Acting completely within the law, the company monopolized the new market and Lady Jane, despite her young age, has become one of the most powerful and rich woman in the world. In doing so, she succeeded in putting the entire drug industry out of business. By taking legal control of the marijuana market, she cut out every small-time dealer who made their living off illegal drugs. When you can buy pot (with a quality guarantee) at the same place you buy your groceries and cigarettes you're not going to buy it from shifty dealer down the street and more crucially, you would need to be much more desperate and miserable to be willing to search out harder drugs. The criminal market for marijuana can't exist and the demand for harder drugs has dropped off to its lowest rate in history. And in the process, a lot more people lost their livelihood than the people who did in 2008 when the sub-prime market situation went tits up.

When the politicians and the activists finally realized what the hell was going on (due in part to a revealing documentary on the pre-legalization drug business and its positive effects on the inter-city economy), it was far too late because WEED Inc. had lobbyists now. Think about the difficulty activists and politicians have had trying to make the tobacco companies responsible for their actions. How hard has it been to reign in Big Oil? This situation would only be different in the specifics. A different corporate evil, one that nobody expected to become a corporation at all when they were clambering for the legalization of the product it sells but once the corporation is formed and cemented there is no majority, no mass of people that could stop it because while we do live in a country where one person still equals one vote, we live in a country where the vote of the majority is in all ways secondary to the money of the corporation that would be put down like a rabid beast by that vote.