I am not a pot smoker, but I know plenty of them. Because I do, I feel confident in this: The Halloween mini-riot early Sunday morning would never have happened if everyone was stoned instead of drunk.
There might have been some unrest in line at the pizza joints, and people may have begun waiting outside the convenience stores six hours before they opened the next morning. But mob mentality and fights would not have happened. Tear gas would have been unnecessary. Stoners have neither the energy nor the aggression to cause such problems.
Yet marijuana possession and distribution still goes heavily punished by states and the federal government. Within the next decade, this will change. It’s already started.
Public opinion has certainly shifted since the time these laws were enacted. As the baby-boomer generation — the first to experience a large-scale embrace of marijuana — gets closer to retirement, the country is finally in the position where almost every citizen has had some experience with pot, whether having used it himself or knowing others who have.
Early films like “Reefer Madness” play upon fear and ignorance of the drug; such tactics do not work anymore. When drug czar John Walters speaks of marijuana’s terrible impact on society through increased domestic violence and “crippling addiction,” former hippies can only laugh. When the Bush administration continues giving it the ominous label of “gateway drug,” it does not realize that it weakens its own argument for prohibition: Pot is only a gateway drug because it is illegal, making the sellers the same sketchy characters who also sell heroin and cocaine. Were the markets for these drugs separated, the gateway effect would disappear.
Then there is the new ad campaign, linking marijuana use with financial support for terrorism. Such ads are fine for deterring individual purchases of marijuana as the law stands now, but they also beg the question: If the prohibition of marijuana is bringing such immense illegal profits to the terror groups that deal the drugs, shouldn’t the government take that market out of the terrorists’ hands?
This paradox may go unnoticed by the oldest generation of Americans, but it is not by many of the baby boomers — the generation currently in power in most of the country. Discussing decriminalization is no longer taboo in politics. It has been embraced by many economic conservatives and social liberals alike, and the medical-marijuana initiatives of today are merely the beginning of this realignment of political reality with public opinion.
Polls show most Americans want to keep pot possession technically against the law, but temper this illegality with lax enforcement, fines or rehab rather than prison and medical loopholes. They are wary of wholesale legalization but also understand the ultimate injustice and social uselessness of sending federal agents to bust a few adults passing a joint in their home, let alone those growing it to help out with little old ladies’ glaucoma (as they did in California last year).
