The Cheat Sheet

In the week after his death, a casualty assistance officer sat at my kitchen table and asked if I would like to be notified if the military found partial remains, the pieces of my husband's body that might be recovered from the crash site after his funeral. Outside a late-autumn storm was building and the air in the room was damp. The officer passed a form across the table and handed me a ballpoint pen, and I realized that this was war. Not the talk of strategy or politics, munitions or taxation; not the discussions on fiscal costs or boots on the ground jingoism. But a life disassembled, pieces trickling in over time.

The real victims of marijuana prohibition aren't stoners who won't live up to their full potential, it's the tens of thousands of young men and women thrown into jail for smoking weed.

I'm worried that one day my nieces and nephews might have to work here, my kids might have to work here and it would still be the same.