It takes less than four hours to run a sizeable distillation. It is not reasonably possible to prohibit such an activity, which can be carried on indoors, with no outwardly visible signs (energy or water expenditure, for example), using legally-available materials.

Nevertheless, the state still outlaws private distillation, even for personal use only. Even though hard liquor is legal.

Why keep pot illegal? I've argued in this space before that one good reason is that pot is an enivronmental intoxicant. Legalization and public consumption of marijuana will inevitably expose innocent people to the smoke, as innocent people are currently exposed to tobacco smoke. Worse than tobacco, secondhand marijuana smoke can have intoxicating effects. You would have to be extremely sensitve to THC to show intoxication from passive inhalation. Here's a summary of a study that claims that passive inhalation in a social setting (i.e., not hotboxing) should not cause a positive test result.

I've also argued that valid conservative reasons -- avoiding disruption to settled social customs -- exist for keeping marijuana illegal. What is the mainstream etiquette for smoking weed socially? There isn't any. We'd have to develop it. What an annoyance. Libertarians may find this a weak reason, but it's a serious claim. Conservatives stand against change, unless it's trumped by social justice. There were, after all, valid conservative reasons to oppose desegregation. They just don't hold water against, you know, equal rights under the law. (Bye-bye, Trent.)

But I don't think that marijuana should be illegal pour encourager les autres.

Year-end is coming up, so our scheduled two weekly hours of charity work (I open the library while my wife does the books) stretched to six. Receiving the advertising revenue for the last magazine issue of the year; paying for things, including internet access; writing charitable donation receipts and making sure they get into this fiscal year. We choose to work together whenever possible, and there turned out to be lots of work for me, even though I'm not the accounting specialist. (Therefore, in my heart, I can still think accounting is kind of cool.)

I ran a couple of errands, so I listened to the car radio (unusually). Apparently some pedophile is now living in an Edmonton community. The question of a cover-up was raised. The RCMP should not be trusted with the investigation, opined an M.P. from Edmonton. Apparently Dudley Do-Right's reputation is no more.

Later, there was a call-in show. The topic was: how to structure your holidays, for the divorced set. Mostly women phoning in to complain about their kids' dads. I don't know: maybe my parents worked it out better than most -- I certainly didn't think so at the time. But I felt a strange compulsion to call in, or better, to grab these women by the lapels and say: "He'll be your child's father forEVER! Your child will remember your nasty comments for the rest of his life! Can't you swallow your pride for a mere ten years?"