Forget about what's happening in the partisan battle for control of Congress and statehouses across the country. The single-most important issue that will be decided on November 2 is California's Proposition 19, a ballot initiative that would legalize the cultivation, consumption, and sale of marijuana and allow municipalities to regulate and tax the stuff.

Though limited to voters in a single state, Prop. 19 is the only policy matter on the table with the potential to restructure the lives of virtually all Americans. If Prop. 19 passes, it will force, at long bloody last, an honest reconsideration of failed prohibitionist policies throughout the United States. In fact, given the drug war's influence on our foreign policy in Latin America and central Asia, Prop. 19's reverberations would even be felt far outside our borders.

Despite overt similarities to liquor prohibition in the 1920s, the drug war actually functions more like the Cold War used to. It's an almost-hidden, infrequently debated structuring device that affects every aspect of American politics, culture, and society. Just as Cold War anxieties transformed educational priorities and politicized everything from the Olympics to fluoridated drinking water, the drug war is everywhere with us. The same schools that plead poverty in teaching basic literature or math still all find time and money for D.A.R.E. and other drug-education classes, despite iffy results. Video games, public-service announcements, and even urinal-cake holders in men's rooms still implore us to just say no. Some 40 million workplace drug tests are administered each year, and even legal prescription drugs are getting some employees fired.

Marijuana has been illegal under federal law since the 1930s, so Prop. 19's passage would immediately trigger a constitutional showdown over whether states have the right to act as what Louis Brandeis called "laboratories of democracy." In the notorious 2005 medical marijuana decision Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court ruled that federal law trumped state law when it comes to a person growing marijuana for personal use, but an affirmative state-wide vote for full-blown legalization will not be as easy to contain, despite Attorney Gen. Eric Holder's threat to "vigorously enforce" the Controlled Substances Act no matter the outcome. Legal precedent firmly establishes that state law enforcement agents are under no mandate to enforce federal laws, and the Dept. of Justice simply lacks the manpower to stop pot smokers at anything more than a symbolic rate.

A legalization win in California, or even a close call, will certainly spread to other states, including ostensibly conservative red states. A 2009 Zogby poll found that 52 percent of adults now agreed that pot should be regulated similar to alcohol, and other national polls all show persistently upward trends and historically high percentages sympathetic to legalization. Pot is the top cash crop in California, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia, and elsewhere. A dozen states, including California, Nebraska, Mississippi and North Carolina, have already decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, and more than that have legalized some form of medical marijuana (Arizona and South Dakota are voting on it this year too). Given marijuana's presence in every part of the country, legalization is not a question of if but when.

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