By Darren Johnson
Campus News
Everything’s going so fast.
With the legalization of pot happening in the Northeast – and soon sports betting will largely be available, what with all of these casinos springing up everywhere – it now seems kind of quaint that fireworks were legalized in most of the counties of New York state a couple of years ago.
And more than the freedom to blaze up a doobie without fear of the cops busting down the door, or to bet on the lowly Jets and curse at the TV each week, my childhood fantasy was to be able to buy all the pyrotechnics I’d wanted.
And now it’s the season where you can buy some, too.
Somehow as a kid, I did get my hands on some fireworks. Maybe an uncle would bring some back from Pennsylvania. Maybe some friendless rich kid would use a brick of Black Cats to entice me to spend some time with him. That ploy worked.
And, now, being able to walk into a local Walmart and see a wall of fireworks has made me feel like a kid again.
However, the thing is, you can only buy really low-level fireworks in New York state – fountains and sparklers and pretty weak stuff overall. 
But, here’s the silver lining: now that the low-level stuff is legal, people are supplementing that with a trip to a state with looser laws. Have you ever been to South of the Border in South Carolina? Bonanza!
OK, you fill up the trunk with some real fireworks and bring them back to New York and now the police mostly let it go. By the time you’ve spent all that gunpowder, all that’s left are burnt shells, and the cops aren’t going to do a whole CSI to determine if your fireworks were bought here or elsewhere.
Legalizing sparklers has proven to be the gateway to whistling bottle rockets and cherry bombs.
(My lifelong goal has been to tie a few dozen exploding bottle rockets to the end of an arrow, light them and shoot the arrow into a “Rambo” standee, as one of those movies featured exploding arrows. This would myth-bust if such weaponry is even possible. I’m thinking not.)
I was on the West Coast last year and took the picture at the top of this page. Pot is mostly legal out there. You can go into a store and buy doobies or edibles or whatever. They only take cash. I checked out one of the places, but it didn’t seem as fun as South of the Border. Massachusetts very soon will have such pot stores, and other Northeast states are poised to follow.
The pols figure they can tax it and make money for state coffers, but I have a feeling we’re all just recycling the same dollars. So many casinos have popped up in just the past couple of years, but they have failed to bring in the money they had originally projected. People are maxed out. There are lottery ticket machines in every other store. I mean, how much more can we donate?
So now sports gambling is getting quickly legalized. All the casino owners think this will save them, and the municipalities will finally get the tax dollars they’d expected. Yep, there’s so much money to be made betting on 18-year-olds playing football for Rutgers or whatever. Maybe, instead, we should pay these kids who likely are taking years off of their bodies for our entertainment?
As a kid, I never could have imagined all this stuff would be legalized.
Someday, soon, I will be able to blaze up a fat one and use that to light the wick of a pyrotechnic fountain and then place a legal bet on tonight’s game via an app on my smart phone – all at the same time.
The thing is, though, when fireworks were first legalized a couple of years ago, I bought a couple of boxes of the stuff, lit a few of them up, had a laugh, and the rest of the items now sit in the back of a closet. The novelty has worn off.
And apparently, so has the novelty of casino gambling, and the same will likely happen after pot legalization and sports betting (we can do that now on the Internet, anyway – big deal). Thus none of this will really help the states’ tax coffers long-term.
You know it’s desperate times when we’re betting on vice to cure a state budget deficit.
Anyway, stay safe this summer fireworks season. Maybe it’s better to just sit back and let the pros put on a fireworks show for you. It costs nothing, and looks so much better.
And that’s the last word … for now.
Darren Johnson operates one of America’s last print newspapers! Volunteer by visiting cccn.us and contacting us.
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