Watching police and policymakers contend with shifting public attitudes toward marijuana would be downright comical if the lives and liberty of so many people weren’t hanging in the balance.

The velocity of that shift has been breathtaking. As recently as Bill Clinton’s tenure as president, every state in the union prohibited the sale of marijuana for any purpose. Today, 32 states (and the District of Columbia) allow doctors to prescribe it for a wide variety of medical problems.

Four other states have approved recreational sales. Washington and Colorado, with populations half the size of Michigan’s, are each on track to collect about half a billion dollars in marijuana-related tax revenue this year.

Michigan voters approved medical marijuana by a large margin in 2008, and advocates of recreational legalization will launch a crowd-funding campaign later this month to put the issue on the November 2016 ballot. [Read more at the Detroit Free-Press]