Without getting all anti-Bush on us, how long until gas prices change for the better?

Signed,
Simply and Utterly Vexed

Dear SUV,

No doubt you're American. Because Europe, Japan and much of the rest of the world pays $4, $5, $6 and more at the pump. They've been doing it for years. What you SHOULD be wondering is when the price of everything else will go up. Because it takes plenty of crude to transport all the things you crave.

It's clear that the world needs to try something radically different. The status quo isn't working. And what's got to change for the better isn't gas prices – it's people's minds.

For one thing, the ones driving the SUVs aren't as patriotic as their "support the troops" bumper stickers would have us believe.

I won't name names, but imagine if the U.S. government spent $200 billion a year on developing alternative energy instead of some misguided war.

You want a real answer? It's wind and solar, my friends, wind and solar. Ideally, it could be financed by legalized bud and the government could spend that $200 billion on health care.

You know what else? I haven't gone off on a tangent for some time, so here goes ...

The other week John Tierney, a conservative columnist at the Times, wrote that the only bud to be legally used for studies and tests in the good ol' U.S.A. is grown on some sorry-ass government-approved farm in the South. What's wrong with that? It's bad bud! They've been testing bad bud!

You know what that says? That says the government is so afraid of the benefits that they keep medical marijuana illegal by making sure the test results prove lackluster.

Here's what Tierney wrote in the Times:

"... but researchers who want marijuana have only one legal source: a crop grown in Mississippi and dispensed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Scientists say they need an alternative partly because the government's marijuana is of such poor quality – too many seeds and stems – and partly because the federal officials are so loath to give it out for research into its medical benefits. Discovering benefits, after all, would undermine the great anti-marijuana campaign that has taken hold in Washington. Marijuana is deemed to be such a powerful "gateway" to other drugs that it's become the top priority in the federal drug war, much to the puzzlement of many scientists, not to mention the police officers who see a lot of worse drugs on the streets."

How can that be?

Here's why: The government can make easy pot busts and convince the conservatives and their sheep that the government has things under control. Instead of legalizing, taxing and taking a giant step toward solving a lot of problems – maybe even bankrolling the proliferation of alternative energy, taking some power and pressure away from the Middle East and, yes, lowering the price of gas.

– Jones