People in Vermont who need medical marijuana, your lives just got a bit easier. On Thursday, Governor Pete Shumlin signed law S. 17 into effect, enabling up to four medical dispensaries in Vermont to sell marijuana to patients who need it. I really wish we’d had laws like this in Missouri back when my grandmothers were both dying of cancer; it could have been pretty darn helpful.

But honestly, I wish all states had laws like these—except that instead of being for just patients, they were for all people. It’s not even the dispensing I want, but the decriminalization of people who smoke weed. Though I’m not one of them, I know plenty of them, and they don’t deserve to go to jail. On the contrary, most of them are much healthier than the law-abiding cigarette smokers and alcoholics that I know. And I’m tired of both families being ripped apart over it and taxpayer money being spent on it; I’d much rather then worked more on the meth labs that riddled places like the neighborhood where I grew up. (Seriously, watching Winter’s Bone last weekend was like déjà vu for me, only my childhood had fewer woods and more trailers.)