Californians will be voting on marijuana legalization in the state in November, and the state NAACP has now endorsed the measure. Why does this matter for ag policy in the United States? I’ll tell you.

But first, because I don’t live in California and I work in corporate America, I want to be clear that I don’t use drugs. I don’t have any philosophical problem with drugs, they just don’t appeal to me. I hate that I even have to make that statement, but in America in the early part of the 21st century, I believe that I do. So that said, let’s talk about California and pot.

I spent several weeks in northern California in 2008 when I did a long spoken word tour (my spoken word promo site is here) and was startled to learn how much of the local economy out there is driven by pot growing and processing. While I’m sure the region is home to plenty of people who don’t partake, medical marijuana licensing has made growing and using pot incredibly open. It’s hard to explain this to fellow southerners, but pot is literally everywhere out there and the sanctions generally amount to a slap on the wrist, if authorities bother with that. I’ve also spent time in British Columbia, Canada, including on that tour, and it’s the only frame of reference I have, except that Canadians are even more relaxed about it because the DEA isn’t really involved in their day to day.

In Vancouver, it didn’t seem exceptional to see someone smoking a joint on the street. California is a little more discrete than that, but people (at least in the northern part of the state) routinely have a few plants growing in their gardens or in containers in their homes. And while ag work is usually thought of as laboring in fields and picking fruit all day, in that region a lot of the ag work, and a lot of well-paid seasonal employment, is teams of people sitting in rooms clipping leaves from dried bud.

You can throw all the moral arguments you want at this, but it’s reality. As long as pot is illegal in the US, this labor force will face intermittent criminal sanction while the task itself will continue unabated. If legalized, these workers would simply work (and pay taxes), and the commercial growers could operate openly (and pay taxes on their earnings), and Californians could just live their lives. The police would no longer be engaged in a perpetual conflict with the citizens they are sworn to protect, and the risk of corruption through bribery or police stealing from growers at traffic stops (both of these scenarios were described over and over again as I talked to people out there) would fade.

Feel however you want to feel about people who smoke pot. Your feelings have absolutely no impact on the untold millions of dollars generated in sales or the untold millions paid for low skill work like trimming bud. Your feelings do nothing about the millions of people who have been incarcerated in America over the years for possession of plant matter, and they certainly don’t do anything about the fact that this country — the land of the free — has the highest incarceration rate of any country on Earth.

Feel what you feel, but know that America’s stubborn insistence on waging a war against marijuana is a job killer, a career killer, a drag on the economy, a cost to every state’s prison budget, and a ridiculous waste of police resources that could be devoted to fighting real crime. Know that our obsession with pot has distorted the 4th Amendment to such a degree that citizens are never safe from state intrusion. Know that our society has used the drug war to create a public policy devoted to incarcerating minorities. Know that marijuana has never killed anyone, but the war against it has killed and caused permanent harm to many, especially young Americans, whose potential is often profoundly limited by a criminal record at what should have been the outset of their involvement in the labor market.

Feel whatever you feel, but the NAACP is right. Marijuana prohibition is a stupid and wasteful policy, and Californians would be wise to vote for repeal of an idiotic, misguided, and mean-spirited program of human suffering.