The ire has simply not materialized. Of the Dispatch's Community Pulse respondents, 7 out of 12 supported the idea of opening a dispensary, and on the web poll, 1,521 people responded, with 67 percent supporting the idea of a dispensary, 33 percent opposing. (To be sure, web poll results are easy enough to bias.) All the blog comments support the idea, many with verbal flings at imaginary conservative opposition.

Police and city staff are researching the legality and likely effects of such a business. In the meantime, let us examine the history of drug prohibition in the United States.

There were no drug laws in colonial America, nor in the United States of America for the first 100 years of our nation's history. The whole pharmacopoeia, including opium and cocaine, was legal. Laudenum, a tincture of opium in an alcohol base, was an extremely popular pain medication, particularly among women, who used it to alleviate menstrual cramps.

The first law banning a specific drug was enacted in free-wheeling, post Gold Rush San Francisco in 1875; it outlawed the smoking of opium in opium dens.

Progressives and muckrakers, including Upton Sinclair, decried the ready availability of drugs and unregulated patent medicines. As a result, in 1906, the first federal law was passed, the Pure Food and Drug Act, which in addition to mandating federal inspection of meat products, forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated food products and patent medicines deemed poisonous. Drugs, including cocaine, were still legal, so long as they were clearly labeled: truth in advertising.

In 1914, the Harrison Act, named after its Democratic author, Francis Burton Harrison of New York, was passed to regulate and tax the production, importation, and sale of opiates. Originally, it only required a license. Later, licenses were not granted and opiates were thus no longer legally available.

In 1920, the sale and transportation of alcohol was prohibited by Constitutional amendment. The amendment was not overturned until 1933. In the meantime, organized crime made huge profits.

In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Law provided for the regulation and taxation of pot, and like the Harrison Act, after a time, licenses were no longer issued and the substance became illegal.

In short, progressives and do-gooders, mostly Democrats, used the laws of the state first to regulate and tax, later to prohibit consumption of mind-altering substances. Simultaneously, illegal crime enterprises mushroomed to fill consumer demand.

Indisputably, marijuana, opium and its derivatives, cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco are bad for the user. They impair judgment and reaction time. Abused, they can kill the user. This is why social conservatives oppose drug legalization: not from ignorance or fear, but because drugs can be addictive and deadly.

However, I am not a social conservative but a paleo-conservative. In my opinion, the twin problems of huge profits fueling the criminal underworld and the incarceration and criminalization of drug users are much worse than drug abuse qua drug abuse.

Therefore, I favor outright legalization of all drugs. Simultaneously, however, we would need to end all forms of welfare, so that addicts will not sit around and get high at taxpayer expense. People who actually have to function at work the next day are much less likely to abuse substances.

As for Gilroy's local issue of the proposed medical marijuana dispensary, I am not interested enough to have an opinion. It may have a bad effect on the community by encouraging illegal drug use. It may have a good effect for some pain-sufferers who will no longer have to drive to Redwood City.

But considered against the backdrop of the drug wars in this nation, it is of no moment and no use at all. It is a bandaid remedy for an infection of flesh-eating bacteria.

Cynthia Walker Cynthia Anne Walker is a homeschooling mother of three and former engineer. She is a published independent author. Her column is published in The Dispatch every Friday.