Skipping Towards Gomorrah (19 page)

There's one big problem with this campaign (well, there are dozens of problems with it, but I want to talk about pot): American pot smokers don't buy marijuana from terrorists. Eleven of the twelve groups on the government's list of terror organizations with links to drug trafficking are based in the Middle East and Colombia, which are not pot-growing regions. The twelfth is a Basque terror group known to traffic in heroin, not pot.

“The majority of America's illicit drug users are solely marijuana smokers, and do not use other drugs such as heroin or illegal opiates,” said Keith Stroup, Executive Director of NORML. “It is patently absurd to suggest that marijuana smokers are in any way supporting terrorism. The overwhelming majority of marijuana consumed in this country is domestically grown or imported from Mexico, Jamaica, or Canada.”

Americans are going to keep using drugs—we always have and we always will. “The drive to alter consciousness is as ancient as humanity itself,” Salim Muwakkil writes in the
Chicago Tribune
. “Some anthropologists argue that psychoactive substances are so common to so many cultures, their use may have some evolutionary benefit.”

The human desire for psychoactive drugs is never going away—the war on drugs, however, can and should go away. If the government is truly interested in cutting off the flow of drug money to terror groups, then George W. Bush should be talking about legalizing drugs, which is possible, and not halting drug consumption, which is impossible. At the very least, the government should be encouraging Americans who want to alter their consciousness to stick to home-grown pot, and not imported coke or heroin. Again, most of the pot smoked in the United States is grown in the United States, and legalizing pot—legalizing all illegal drugs—would get the profits out of the hands of crooks and terrorists and into the hands of big business people and the politicians they support. For Republicans, drug legalization is a win-win.

 

I
n keeping with the theme of sloth, I would like to lift seven wonderful arguments in favor of legalizing pot from a brilliant piece I stumbled across in a national magazine.

1. “Marijuana is widely used, and for the vast majority of its users is nearly harmless. . . .”

2. “Most people who use marijuana, even people who use it with moderate frequency, don't go on to use any other illegal drug. . . . ‘There is no evidence,' says [the National Academy of Sciences], that marijuana serves as a stepping stone [to harder drugs].”
⁷

3. “Two researchers in 1991 studied the addictiveness of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. Both ranked caffeine and marijuana as the least addictive. [One] ranked marijuana as slightly less addictive than caffeine.”

4. “A small minority of people who smoke it may—by choice, as much as any addictive compulsion—eventually smoke enough of it for a long enough period of time to suffer impairments so subtle that they may not affect every day functioning or be permanent. Arresting, let alone jailing, people for using such a drug seems outrageously disproportionate.”

5. “For the overwhelming majority of its users marijuana is not the least bit dangerous.”

6. “If it's on the basis of effect—namely, intoxication—that [drug warrior] William Bennett considers marijuana immoral, then he has to explain why it's different from drunkenness, and why this particular sense of well-being should be banned in an America that is now the great mood-altering nation, with millions of people on Prozac and other drugs primarily meant to make them feel good.”

7. “Drug warriors recently have tried to argue that research showing marijuana acts on the brain in a way vaguely similar to cocaine and heroin—plugging into the same receptors—proves that it somehow ‘primes' the brain for harder drugs. But alcohol has roughly the same action, and no one argues that Budweiser creates heroin addicts.”

What lefty publication did I find this pro-pot piece in?
The Nation? The Progressive? The American Prospect?
No, I found it in
National Review,
the hard-right home of William F. Buckley Jr. (“Weed Whackers: The Anti-Marijuana Forces and Why They're Wrong,” Richard D. Lowry,
National Review,
August 20, 2001). Do not despair, right wingers:
National Review
hasn't gone soft on us. In the same issue that Lowry, the magazine's editor, came out swinging for pot, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, Kenneth L. Connor, wrote, “. . . even in a system of representative self-government, the people do not have a right to do what is wrong.” And who gets to determine what is and isn't wrong? Connor didn't say, and
National Review
's get-the-government-off-our-backs editors didn't challenge him on the point.

Nevertheless, on account of the Richard Lowry piece on pot, I am now a proud subscriber to—and the occasional ripper-upper of—
National Review,
a magazine that hates only trial lawyers and Susan Sontag more than it hates homosexuals. (If Susan Sontag spoke before an organization of gay trial lawyers, well, that might give the editorial board of
National Review
brain aneurysms all around.) But, hey, politics makes strange bedfellows, and why should the politics of pot be an exception? In the spirit of strange bedfellows, Richard Lowry has a standing invitation to crawl into bed with me, my boyfriend, a bag of chips, and a single joint. We'll get baked, and watch
Showgirls
on video. Lowry is a busy man, and he could probably use the occasional pot getaway just as much as or more than I can. This bud's for you, Rich.

But Lowry's voice is a lonely one on the right—and on the left, for that matter. Marijuana came no closer to being legalized under eight years of Bill Clinton, who didn't inhale, and Vice President Al Gore, who is rumored to have spent a few years doing little else. Bill Clinton's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was something of a pathological liar. “The murder rate in Holland is double that in the United States,” McCaffrey said on CNN. “That's drugs.” In reality, the Dutch homicide rate is one-fourth that of the United States. “The most dangerous drug in America is a twelve-year-old smoking pot because they put themselves in this enormous statistical probability of having a [hard] drug problem,” McCaffrey said on CNN in 1997. In reality, for every ten people who have used marijuana, there is only one regular user of cocaine and less than one heroin addict.

No one who smokes pot is under any delusions about George W. Bush pulling a Nixon-in-China on marijuana decriminalization, but his choice for drug czar still came as something of a shock. On the campaign trail, Bush made noises about treating marijuana more as a public health issue and less as a criminal justice issue. Once he was elected, Bush reversed course, appointing John Walters, a former deputy of William J. Bennett, as his drug czar. Walters believes in tossing nonviolent drug users in jail, and like his old boss, Bill Bennett, Walters refuses to acknowledge that there's any difference between smoking a little marijuana and shooting a whole lot of heroin. It's hard to imagine that Walters, Bennett, and Bush—all baby boomers—don't know dozens if not hundreds of friends, former college classmates, coworkers, and family members who smoked pot and lived to tell the tale.

While most politicians know from personal experience that marijuana is utterly harmless, boomers taking over all the top jobs in Washington isn't moving pot any closer to legalization, thanks to political cowardice. It doesn't help that their own drug-war rhetoric has boxed them into a corner; like the Catholic Church on the issues of birth control, celibacy, and female priests, the federal government's rhetoric on drugs has left it precious little wiggle room. “We were wrong” isn't something the feds or the Vatican have an easy time saying. At the rate we're going, matricide will be decriminalized before marijuana—at least in the United States.

Canada is moving towards decriminalization, as is Great Britain. In March of 2002, Tony Blair's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) recommended that “all cannabis preparations” be essentially decriminalized. Unlike the United States, which arrests and prosecutes 600,000 marijuana users (not dealers,
users
) every year, Great Britain is moving towards the Holland model: the possession of small amounts of pot won't be prosecuted, and the sale of marijuana will be tolerated in Dutch-style “cafés.”

“The high use of cannabis is not associated with major health problems for the individual or society,” according to Britain's ACMD, “[and] the occasional use of cannabis is only rarely associated with significant problems in otherwise healthy individuals.” According to the
London Evening Standard,
“[the ACMD] makes it clear that alcohol is far more damaging than cannabis to health and society at large because it encourages risk-taking and leads to aggressive and violent behaviour.”

The Brits haven't discovered something we don't already know. In 1972, Richard Nixon's National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommended that marijuana use and possession be decriminalized; in 1982, the National Academy of Sciences not only recommended that marijuana use and possession be decriminalized, “but that lawmakers give serious consideration to creating a system or regulated distribution,” as well, according to NORML. In 2000, a long-term study conducted by Kaiser Permanente found that not only wasn't there a link between regular marijuana use and death but also that the marijuana prohibition represented the only real health risk to the user. (Ask anyone who was raped in a holding cell after being picked up for marijuana possession.) Kaiser recommended that, “medical guidelines regarding prudent use . . . be established, akin to the common-sense guidelines that apply to alcohol use.”

American politicians, unlike their British and Canadian counterparts, refuse to wake up to reality. Pot isn't a threat to our health, our nation's productivity, or our national security.

Voters seem to get it. Medical-marijuana initiatives have passed in Alaska; Arizona; California; Colorado; Hawaii; Maine; Nevada; Oregon; Washington State; and Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2000, voters in California approved a state initiative that mandated treatment, not jail time, for nonviolent drug offenders. There is one glimmer of hope among our elected representatives; in Vermont the State House of Representatives passed a medical marijuana bill in March of 2002. (Vermont's Democratic governor plans to veto the bill if it makes it through the Vermont Senate.) As Lowry pointed out in
National Review,
“[medical marijuana] is the camel's nose under the tent for legalization, and so—for many of its advocates—it is. Both sides in the medical-marijuana controversy have ulterior motives, which suggests it may be time to stop debating the nose and move on to the full camel.” Debating the camel is good for pot legalization, since all the facts support legalization. Indeed, it was examining the facts that forced the reliably conservative
National Review
to go all wobbly on marijuana prohibition. I live in hope that one day marijuana will be as legal as it is widely available.

Will some people smoke too much pot after marijuana is legalized? Sure they will—but they're the same people who
already
smoke too much pot. Countries that have decriminalized marijuana possession haven't seen a surge in marijuana consumption. Americans who want pot now already have pot. The idea that prohibition is all that stands between people who wanna get high and pot is absurd; it's one more faulty assumption heaped on the drug warrior's vast pile of faulty assumptions. The idea that legalizing pot will make us a nation of out-of-control stoners can be demolished with one word: beer. In addition to being addictive, inebriating, and potentially life-threatening, beer is also perfectly legal, culturally celebrated, and widely advertised. And yet we're not a nation of drunks. Why? Because the vast majority of us don't want to be drunk all the time. Even people who like to get drunk once in a while don't want to be drunk every day.

Robert Bork disagrees. He looks at Americans and sees a people that, but for the intervention of the state, can't control themselves. “An increasing number of alienated, restless individuals, individuals without strong ties to others, except in the pursuit of ever more degraded distractions and sensations. And liberalism has no corrective within itself; all it can do is endorse more liberty and demand more rights,” Bork writes in
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
. Like most Americans, I have sought out distractions and sensations that Bork would regard as degraded. (One man's degraded distraction is another man's pursuit of happiness.) Bork assumes that a man who pursues happiness in places or with plants he doesn't care for can never be satisfied, that he must go from degraded distraction to degraded distraction. However, like most Americans, I don't need the architects of “liberalism” to instill in me a sense of control or balance. I have a corrective within myself (it's called being a sensible adult), liberalism doesn't have to stick one in me like some sort of vibrating butt plug.

You see, Mr. Bork, while I like pot, and I can get my hands on just as much pot as I want, I don't actually smoke pot all that often. Why? Because I don't want to be high all the time. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have goals, aspirations, and desires that preclude spending all my time in bed, stoned out of my mind, watching
Showgirls
with Richard Lowry. My corrective may not kick in when you would like it to—that is, it doesn't kick in at the same point yours does—but that doesn't mean I don't have one.

Another favorite tactic of drug warriors is to turn any conversation about legalizing pot into a conversation about legalizing heroin, in the same way they seek to turn any conversation about people who smoke pot at home into one about surgeons who smoke pot at work. (Drug warriors are addicted to the logical fallacy of changing the subject.) While many of the same arguments for legalizing pot can be applied to legalizing heroin, nowhere is it written that if one banned drug is legalized all banned drugs have to be legalized at the same time. The two drugs can and should be debated separately. But let's talk about heroin: Since 1989, the number of people who have used heroin in their lifetime has remained constant, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Admissions to emergency rooms for heroin-related causes, however, have almost doubled, from 38,100 in 1989 to 79,000 in 1998 (the most recent year for which figures are available). Why are heroin casualties growing while heroin use stays constant? Because the heroin available on the street is purer and stronger today than it was in 1989. Clearly, our never-ending war on drugs isn't having any impact on heroin use or consumption—unless you count making heroin more dangerous.