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What the Other Green Party's Big Win Means

Weed's on its way to being legal.

I can almost imagine a younger, surf-glowed Barry Obama torching up some of that fine devil’s cabbage in slow celebration over the turning of history’s tide.

One of the more notable stories from yesterday’s big returns, of course, is that of voters in Colorado and Washington state approving ballot measures to legalize marijuana. Fifty-two percent of Colorado voters sided with Amendment 64, which will greenlight the sale of up to an ounce of weed at specialty shops to those over the age of 21, according to The Denver Post. Adults there will also be able to tend to a half dozen homegrown plants of their own. In Washington, voters approved Initiative 502 by a 10-point margin, the Seattle Times reports. As with Colorado, it’ll no longer be illegal (the measure kicks in Dec. 6) for Washingtonians 21 and up to buy an O of the sticky stuff.

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These are but two states, sure. And you better believe there’s likely a good deal of legal wrangling and unwarranted searches and seizures and jailings coming down through the haze of victory, because this is America. That’s how shit works.

But these are historic results. (Worth mentioning, too, is voters in Massachusetts, Willard Romney’s home turf, approving the medicinal use of marijuana by wide margins.) And while there’s no telling how they’ll pan out, on paper their implications are already wide ranging. It’s breaks down, roughly, into four categories: job creation, taxation (and by extension, state’s actually making money), scientific control (see: better weed, American made), and putting ruthless Mexican cartels out of business.

In both states, an influx of product at weed shops is going to demand a bigger green work force. It’ll be a small uptick, but job growth is job growth, right? Same goes for taxing the stupid stuff – in Washington alone, yesterday’s vote kickstarts the state’s Liquor Control Board setting rules for “heavily taxed and regulated sales at state-licensed marijuana stores,” the Times reports, which are projected to net $1.9 million in revenue through 2017. With legalization comes control, and thus a definitive and formalized scientific knowledge of the bud being sold in the new green economy. No more shitty, pruned-out, even laced product spoiling these two states’ markets. Which weren’t ever really the preserve of Mexican cartels that have been – and will continue for a while, to be sure – laugh all the way to the bank, of course. Yet in a still slumping national economy, imagine more and more states following suit, and a day where El Chapo’s smuggle tech is rendered moot.

If none of this is a sign of the blunt force trauma maybe coming for prohibition’s old guard, well, what is?

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Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson