David Hoppe

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:: Getting sane about pot

It’s time for honesty

By David Hoppe

We have our first black president and the tide is turning in favor of gay marriage as one state after another – even Iowa! – figures out that what’s fair is, well, fair. Knocking time-encrusted barnacles from our social hull feels good. What’s next?

Anyone care for a spliff?

The folks favoring reform of our country’s marijuana laws think that maybe, just maybe, some kind of change is finally coming. A confluence of events, including a new, seemingly rational president, a Democratic congress and, above all, the desperate desire on the part of states and municipalities to simultaneously cut costs and increase revenues, have all served as encouragements to advocates for a sane approach to the use of marijuana in the United States.

A sane approach to how we think about marijuana would be a change for the better. Until the late 1930’s, the use of products derived from marijuana was common, although marijuana smoking was a subcultural phenomenon, associated, as Harry Anslinger, our first drug czar, so pithily put it, with, “Negroes, Mexicans and entertainers.” Louis Armstrong loved the stuff.

Ironically, repeal of the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in 1933, during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term in office, seems to have played a part in fueling an anti-marijuana binge. Newly blessed liquor producers and their allies in the tobacco industry both supported outlawing pot. They got their way in 1937, over the protestations of the American Medical Association, who wanted to continue to use marijuana derivatives for medical purposes.

But you can argue that our muddled thinking about pot goes back further, to 1914, when the Narcotics Act mistakenly lumped marijuana in with cocaine and heroin as addictive drugs. Marijuana, it turns out, is not addictive and it’s not a narcotic. This mislabeling, though, has sanctioned and enforced a willfully official ignorance, inspiring an enormous law enforcement bureaucracy. This, in turn, has inhibited serious research into pot’s medicinal properties and, worst of all, made pot a kind of forbidden fruit that can’t be openly talked about without the risk of social stigma or legal consequence.

It is simply weird that millions of people, in virtually all walks of American life, smoke pot with about the same impact on their personal lives, for better or for worse, as might be associated with regular wine drinking. Yet the cultivated consumption of wine can get you a well-paid position in any of our best restaurants, whereas a similar appreciation for pot might land you in the hoosegow.

Recent events suggest that this could be changing. In April, a legislative odd couple, Barney Frank and Ron Paul, introduced legislation to remove restrictions from the cultivation of industrial hemp. This is a fibrous and extremely useful form of cannabis that’s less than worthless when packed in rolling paper. Industrial hemp was grown widely in Indiana during World War II. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s college students in these parts couldn’t believe their luck when they found the stuff growing wild in ditches. Then they tried to smoke it and discovered that, yes, you really do get what you pay for.

But just breaking through the encrusted mislabeling that has prohibited farmers from growing a useful cash crop could be a step in the right direction.

Then there are the drug wars in Mexico. On a recent visit there, Sec. of State Clinton agreed with her hosts that part of solving Mexico’s problem with narco-traffickers depends on shrinking the U.S. market for Mexican dope. Well, just about every state in the union has its own, lucrative, black market in locally grown weed. If we could buy local legally, we might eliminate narco-traffickers from the equation.

Which brings us to what marijuana advocates consider the most compelling aspect of the current situation.

State and local governments are flirting with bankruptcy. Revenues are down, but the costs of providing government services – including public safety and a court system – are ever more expensive. In some communities, accused felons are not being brought to trial because there aren’t prosecutors enough to try and convict them. Under these circumstances, can we afford to be filling court dockets and crowding jails with men and women accused of marijuana-related offenses? And if, for pragmatic reasons, some law enforcers have arbitrarily decided to turn a blind eye on selected marijuana offenses, shouldn’t we face this new reality and amend our laws accordingly? That only seems fair.

If it appears a relatively short step from here to the determination to turn marijuana you can smoke into a cash crop and a state source of revenue worth billions…that’s logical. But logic will have to wrestle with those puritanical angels that are forever worrying us over whatever favors pleasure over guilt, the self over duty.

In any event, we may be able to start openly talking about these things in terms that honestly own, rather than deny, our experiences with pot. That won’t end our long and misbegotten war on marijuana, but it will represent a welcome truce.