This fall, Colorado and Nevada will vote on marijuana-legalization initiatives. Others--Montana, Oregon and possibly Arkansas--will vote on medicinal-marijuana bills. Such contests are now common across the nation. Last December in Denver, for instance, the marijuana activists won. Now, claiming their efforts are “non-partisan,” the federal Drug Enforcement Agency is spearheading resistance. These issues are some of the most important on this fall’s ballot: they’re about civil rights and America’s future.

"Yeah, the sixties are over with, "the Coloradoan growled, "but they forgot to tell them that up in Boulder"--or apparently in many areas of America. No, hippies aren’t supposed to exist today; yet, look around, and most everywhere, there they are--the majority of whom had yet to be born when the sixties ended. Nationally, hippies probably comprise about ten percent of the population. We tend to recite the clichè that hippies no longer exist because powerful forces in America promote that de-legitimizing notion. They consider the counterculture a menace to Western Civilization, something with no rightful place in modern America. Recall, for example, Interior Secretary James Watts’ 1983 attempt to ban the Beach Boys from the national Independence Day ceremony.

Well, particular drugs have always had ethnic identifications. And historically in America, if the powers-that-be wanted to persecute an ethnic group, they went after their drugs. America’s first anti-drug laws, according to John Helmer’s Drugs and Minority Oppression, targeted opium as a way of persecuting Chinese immigrants. In the 1930’s, our first marijuana laws were imposed to harass Mexican-Americans; the pleas of a Colorado newspaper editor were made Congressional testimony: “I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents.” Early cocaine laws were fueled by racist stereotypes of intoxicated black men raping white women.

And today, marijuana laws are aimed primarily at the counterculture--we’re filling our prisons with hippies. But hippies aren’t criminals: they’re a people criminalized as part of a drive to, as drug warrior and former Attorney General John Mitchell once put it, “take the country so far to the right you won‘t recognize it.”

So, it’s not just hippies getting hurt: it’s all of America. To the extent a society has an official pariah group, it becomes ugly and repressive--could Hitler, for instance, have consolidated power without widespread and institutionalized anti-Semitism? For forty years, America has treated hippie-Americans as illegitimate, second-class citizens. The results have been catastrophic: The Bill of Rights, particularly the Fourth Amendment, has been crippled. Often our elections have been driven by hippie hating and hippie-baiting; Newt Gingrich, for example, returned the GOP to Congressional power in 1994 largely by branding the Clintons “counterculture McGoverniks.” Neoconservatives blame hippies for everything from urban decay to abortion to our loss in Vietnam; when a minority is scapegoated, a nation turns from the true source of its problems and thus from solving them.

A fair look at today’s counterculture, on the other hand, reveals a cultural dynamo. Its contributions range from the personal computer to a thriving natural-foods industry to the Muppets to winning a slew of U.S. medals in the 2006 Winter Olympics, among many others. We stereotype hippies as smoked-stupid Tommy Chong’s from That 70’s Show or as sixties Rip Van Winkle welfare bums--losers. But what about star entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson? What about natural-foods developer Alice Waters, hailed by PBS as an “American Master”? What about Dr. Andrew Weil, increasingly the nation’s most trusted source on health and healing? What about countercultural Bono, one of Time’s 2005 Persons of the Year?

Voters will hear manipulative appeals about “protecting our children from drugs,” but it’s alcohol that’s killing them; pot-is-dangerous arguments are pretexts for repression. No, not all hippies are pot smokers, and not all pot smokers are countercultural, but essentially, legalization efforts are part of a struggle by a relatively new ethnicity, now known as “the counterculture,” for social equality. Only the most bigoted still doubt that the African-American Civil Rights Movement made America a better place. Ultimately, civil-rights movements benefit societies; they civilize us; they lead us forward. These measures to legalize marijuana are something this nation needs.