IF YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH TO DIE FOR YOUR COUNTRY, YOU OUGHT TO BE ABLE TO...smoke? CNS News has an article titled "NJ Mulls Hiking Legal Smoking Age to 21".

Like this is going to stop smoking by teenagers. I went to a school in New Jersey whose main building was decimated by a fire caused by an errant cigarette in the senior class lounge. (The structure shown on the home page of their Website took about twenty years to finally get built to replace it--but that's another story.) After that, the school banned smoking on campus by students, at the risk of expulsion. As I recall, a couple of years later, the daughter of the headmaster got caught...smoking. And lots of kids would simply sag off to the street behind the school to smoke.

As marijuana appears to slowly, very slowly creep towards decriminalization, it's counterpart, legal since the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, appears to be far more rapidly approaching complete prohibition. Odd, isn't it?