The Ravens may have beaten the 49ers in the 2013 Super Bowl, but it wasn't the only faceoff.
According to Yahoo sports news, 50-year-old Myles Wilkinson beat out almost 4 million other contestants to win a trip to the Super Bowl, only to have his luck squashed by U.S. customs agents who dug up a 1981 conviction of the 19-year-old Wilkinson for possession of two grams of marijuana.
That's about the same weight as two large paperclips, but it was enough to sink his trip to New Orleans. At the time, he was fined only $50, less than the cost of a speeding ticket.
Meanwhile, 18 states have enacted laws to legalize medical marijuana, 10 more states have such laws pending, and two states have gone so far as to decriminalize recreational marijuana use.
According to the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, more than 25 million Americas smoked marijuana during 2008, and the European medical journal The Lancet said, "The smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health. ... It would be reasonable to judge cannabis as less of a threat ... than alcohol or tobacco."
Nevertheless, Dana Larsen, director of the Sensible B.C. campaign, a group advocating for the decriminalization of marijuana in British Columbia, said, "There's hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have these criminal records for small amounts of cannabis and that results in a lifetime ban for accessing the U.S."
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