The headlines tell it all: “The Campaign To Decriminalize Pot,” “Marijuana As Medicine Will Continue,” “Marijuana Decision Does Not Solve Issue,” “Ohio Group Writes Bill Proposal On Medicinal Marijuana,” “Marijuana Use Gets A Boost.” These summarize a few of the stories about marijuana that appeared in Ohio’s newspapers this year according to the Media Awareness Project (MAP) of DrugSense at http://www.mapinc.org.

Just three years ago, the headlines read: “Marijuana Harvest Brings Out The Authorities,” “Police, Marijuana-sniffing Dog Sweep Through Madison High,” “Deputies Arrest Man after Finding 5,000 Marijuana Plants,” and “Medical Marijuana Law Dumped.” What happened? Why has reporting focused on law enforcement shifted to reporting focused on medicine?

A strange thing happened on the way through the millennium. The media got it. A quiet revolution has occurred in the way Americans and others worldwide view this much-maligned plant.

Behind this shift lie facts like these, again from MAP:

Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland, California was the lone voice of conscience when she had the courage to stand up firmly against the resolution to authorize U.S. military action to respond to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The following is a text of her dissent.

Rep. Barbara Lee: “Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and loved ones who were killed and injured in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Only the most foolish or the most callous would not understand the grief that has gripped the American people and millions across the world.

This unspeakable attack on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction. September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.

I know that this use-of-force resolution will pass although we all know that the

A consensus now exists across the American political spectrum, left to right, that everything fundamentally changed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. To be sure, there was an upsurgence of patriotism and national chauvinism, a desire to “avenge” the innocent victims of the Al Qaeda network’s terrorism.

I would suggest, however, that the events of recent weeks are not a radical departure into some new, uncharted political territory, but rather the culmination of deeper political and economic forces set into motion more than two decades ago.

Some reckon that the provision of any sort of historical context is an outrage to the memory of those slaughtered in the Sept. 11 attacks. Here's Christopher Hitchens, writing in the current Nation: "Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content."

Hitchens seems to be arguing that Osama bin Laden and his Muslim cohorts are so pure a distillation of evil that they are outside history and any system of overall accounting. So all you can tell your kids is that the guys who planned and carried out those Sept. 11 attacks are really bad guys.

This isn't very helpful, particularly since among those kids to whom we are trying to explain Sept. 11 are America's future leaders and policymakers. Don't we want them to understand history in terms more complex than those of flag-wagging at the moral level of a spaghetti western?

What moved those kamikaze Muslims, among them many middle-class graduates from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to embark some many months ago on the

The Bush administration has vowed that it will not aim the Pentagon's firepower at civilian targets in Afghanistan. Such assurances are supposed to make us think that innocent bystanders will be spared when the missiles fly and the warheads explode. Don't believe it.

Back in early August 1945, President Truman had this to say: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians."

Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb's deadly power. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundreds of thousands of civilians died -- immediately or eventually -- as a result of the atomic bombings.

In the past several decades, presidents have routinely expressed their reverence for civilian lives while trying to justify orders that inevitably destroyed civilian lives. Denial is key to the success of public-relations campaigns that always accompany war.