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The California initiative comes amidst a flurry of activity nationally in the past two months after nearly two-decades of inactivity, according to Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington D. C., which advocates legalization of marijuana. California has a legislative bill in the offing, he says, as does Washington State while New Hampshire has recently introduced a bill and Rhode Island has adopted a commission to study ideas.“There are signs all over the place that this has reached critical mass,” says Mirken, citing the photograph of Olympic superstar Michael Phelps last summer. He also says that law enforcement agencies have begun to realize the high cost of arresting, trying, and incarcerating marijuana users – money that could be better spent elsewhere. [Editor's note: The original version of this story mischaracterized the situation involving Mr. Phelps.]

Hall points out that for the last 20 years, nearly two-thirds of all first-time marijuana users have been below the age of 18. Statistics also show that the younger a person begins marijuana use, the greater the risk of substance abuse later in life, he says. Therefore, it’s important to ask a host of questions: Who is going to determine or regulate how marijuana is produced and distributed? Who will it be distributed by? How is the state going to collect the taxes? Will it really have an impact on the illicit trafficking and production of marijuana? Will this lead to proposals to legalize other drugs?

Dan Newman, spokesman for the proposed Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act, counters that the initiative does includes significant safeguards and controls. For example, it will increase the penalty for providing marijuana to a minor, expressly prohibit the consumption of marijuana in public, forbids smoking marijuana while minors are present, and bans possession on school grounds.He also says that studies by state tax experts – the Board of Equalization and the Legislative Analyst Office – show that the initiative will generate billions of dollars in revenue to fund schools, public safety, and other critical needs at a time when the state is desperate for resources.

There's no question, however, that American attitudes toward marijuana have changed. National polls show that Americans increasingly favor legalizing marijuana. More than 40 percent of Americans consistently supported legalization this year. Gallup surveys put that support at 44 percent now, up from 25 percent in 1995.

Even California may be having some regrets. Some 120 towns and cities there have banned medical-pot outlets since 2006, according to Americans for Safe Access.

U.S. manufacturing firms spend almost three times as much per worker per hour for healthcare as our most important foreign competitors--$2.38 versus $0.96. Healthcare costs drive employers to move jobs overseas, grow jobs outside of the United States, and limit the ability of firms to invest to improve productivity [and] compete more effectively in the future.

Analysis also shows that the U.S. economy loses as much as $207 billion annually because of the lost productivity stemming from the poor health and shorter lifespan of the uninsured. Employers notice the workplace productivity loss, which for a full-time worker equals four days a month in lost work time.

On the budget front, the House bill would reduce deficits by $138 billion over the next decade and the Senate measure would reduce deficits by $130 billion over that period, says the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which predicts the two measures would continue to reduce deficits for at least a decade thereafter. The bills would achieve this goal through a combination of spending cuts (largely in Medicare) and tax increases that, together, exceed the costs of bringing health insurance coverage to about 95 percent of all legal residents. The House and Senate bills deserve much more credit for cost control than they have received. They [address] almost all areas that experts have identified as promising areas for reducing the growth of healthcare spending. Most important, both would create a health insurance exchange to promote competition among private health insurance plans based on price and quality, reduce administrative costs, and provide a platform for systemic change across the healthcare system.

The only answer to the question of whether IP serves the desired purpose must be empirical. Does it work in practice? A great deal of applied economic research has tried to answer this question. The short answer is that intellectual property does not increase innovation and creation. Extending IP rights may modestly boost the incentive for innovation, but this positive effect is wiped away by the negative effect of creating monopolies. There is simply no evidence that strengthening patent regimes increases innovation or economic productivity. In fact, some evidence shows that increased protection even decreases innovation.

Ideas kept under lock and key are much less useful than those that are freely available. So we find Africans dying of AIDS because they cannot afford to pay monopoly prices to patent holders of certain drugs. Or, at a more mundane level, we cannot legally watch movies on our new Android phones because "rights holders" do not wish us to. And we must suffer through such indignities as being sued by voting machine companies over copyright violation when their malfunctioning software is revealed to the public.

Rather than trying to continually fix the existing system with band-aids, it would be far better to eliminate it entirely. The resulting drastic restructuring of industry would lead to new, more competitive business models – and an environment far more favorable to the small entrepreneur.

The agency is also on weak legal ground in interpreting a four-decade-old law that was never intended to deal with global warming. And its efforts might be hung up in courts for years, providing yet another excuse for Congress not to act. (Both businesses and some eco-activists are expected to challenge the EPA move.)

Letting the agency take the initiative also makes the effort against global warming vulnerable to a new president reversing its action in future years.

In 1976, the EPA tried to avoid regulating diverse sources for lead emissions, focusing on major ones. But in a lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, it lost in court. It should not try such a move again.