For all practical purposes, marijuana use is legal in Dane county, especially so in Madison and especially on Madison's near East side.
In the 70s the Madison City Council passed laws decrimalizing marijuana use and a few years ago Dane County's top law enforcement official, DA Brian Blanchard, announced he wasn't going to waste law enforcement limited resources pursuing marijuana possession charges-- adding another layer of decriminalization.
However, Madison's law enforcement must think that marijuana just magically appears in bongs and recently put hundreds of thousands of police resources into busting a small time pot-growing operation on Madison's East side.
While I'm not a pot-smoker myself, I used to be neighbors to these drug king pins. Yes, I can attest that they are hippies and they do indeed supply many of their fellow East side hippies with marijuana -- who can smoke a joint walking down the street in Madison, without getting hassled by the police.
This whole "sting" has illustrated just how absurd our nation's marijuana policy is nationwide, but especially in Madison. By arresting these local, small-time entrepreneurs, they are basically saying, "Keep smoking pot, hippies, just make sure you get it from the violent drug gangs in Mexico and not from your neighborhood small-time growers."
In this era of limited government resouces, this is the last place I'd like to see my tax dollars spent. Instead, I'd like to see my tax dollars augmented by the taxing of marijuana!