Aren't you glad that when the government tells people not to do something, they obey?

Uh....or perhaps they aren't.

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

''This is reality-check research,'' said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. ''Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.''

Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.

The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people -- about 33,000 of them women -- in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer's analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.

''The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds,'' Finer said.

Under the Bush administration, such programs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

So the calls by the gasbags on the right for a sexual restraint on the part of others that they refuse to practice themselves are falling, as they should be, on deaf ears. And on the subject of drugs, guess what America's #1 cash crop is?

Marijuana is the most valuable cash crop in the United States, worth more to its growers than corn and wheat combined, according to a new report by a leading American drug reform lobbyist that cites the US government's own figures.

Decades of government efforts to crack down on both the cultivation and consumption of pot have had a counter-productive effect, since even the most conservative government estimates suggest domestic marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past 25 years. It is the leading cash crop in 12 states, and one of the top five crops in 39 states.

The report's author, Jon Gettman, says it is "larger than cotton in Alabama, larger than grapes, vegetables and hay in California, larger than peanuts in Georgia, and larger than tobacco in South and North Carolina".

[snip]

Since the presidency of George Bush Snr in the late 1980s, official policy has been one of zero tolerance of all illegal narcotics. Recently, the federal government has been unforgiving of the medical marijuana movement, and federal agents have raided numerous marijuana farms that were fully licensed under state law.

It has not cut down use of the drug.

No new stories on rock 'n' roll, probably because there are young Christofascist Zombies making a living off of it. But if you needed further proof that despite the volume of noise coming from conservative Christians that this is a conservative, chaste nation, nothing could be further from the truth. Most Americans know this, and this may be part of the reason why a majority of Americans finally said "Enough!" to Republican efforts to legislate behavior in the last election.

It's ironic that the Republican party, which has talked about less government at least since the Reagan years, allowed itself to be co-opted by moral scolds out of the mainstream. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats who are inclined to believe that we should somehow "reach out" to these misguided Carry Nations who would tell everyone else to live.

I'm not a potsmoker. During the days more than 20 years ago when I would partake every now and then, I found that the stuff just puts me to sleep. And if it's not fun, why do it? But when you think about the people doing long prison sentences for marijuana, and you think about the money being generated by this crop, one wonders how so-called conservatives can continue to believe that the War on Pot can possibly be successful -- unless you define "success" the way George W. Bush defines success in Iraq -- throw money at it in perpetuity, talk a lot about victory, and never accomplish anything other than a lot of ruined lives.