Pubdate: Mon, 19 Nov 2012
Source: Taranaki Daily News (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2012 Fairfax New Zealand Limited
Contact:  http://www.thedailynews.co.nz/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1056
Author: Andrew Sullivan
Page: 8

AMERICAN RIGHT'S COUP DE GRASS

The door has been opened for cannabis to be legalised across the US,
and it's thanks to conservatives, writes Andrew Sullivan.

Every country and every culture has its hypocrisies. But the vast,
sprawling cultural and social churn of America abounds in them.
Americans live in a world of sin and salvation.

One of the most striking hypocrisies I have encountered is over
cannabis. The plant is among America's biggest cash crops. It is a
rite of passage for a vast plurality of college students. Every recent
president has smoked pot, although the full extent of Bill Clinton's
inhalation remains a Jesuitical mystery. The current president - as
any image search on Google will show you - has a photograph from his
days in the Choom Gang at his high school, where he is drawing
joyfully on a joint.

David Maraniss' new biography of Barack Obama has details of his
pothead past, revealing that Obama was not succumbing to peer pressure
  he was the peer pressure. He initiated a term called 'TA' in his
group, meaning 'total absorption', and would impose penalties on those
who didn't keep the smoke in their lungs for long enough. Unlike
Clinton and George W Bush, Obama spoke openly about this before he was
elected. And it was no big deal.

Why? Because America smokes weed almost as reflexively as it consumes
alcohol. It is in Republican America, where they are as protective of
their weed as of their guns, and also in Democrat America, where it
takes the edge off urban and suburban stress. An entire television
series, Weeds, brilliantly explored its middle-class base.

Yet this staggering fact remains: last year about 800,000 people were
arrested for pot possession. Compare that with 1973 when there were
only 300,000 arrests for all kinds of drugs and you see the way in
which the war on drugs has escalated.

More than eight million people have been arrested for pot possession
since 2000  and those arrests can stop a person getting clearance for
even basic employment thereafter. A huge proportion of the arrested
are young, black and male.

In New York most of these arrests come from stopping "suspicious"
young men, searching them and finding a joint. An outcry against the
racial disparity briefly forced the city's mayor this year to say he
was reviewing the policy. Then he retreated. The police said this
little misdemeanour was effective in lowering crime by removing a big
number of young blacks from the streets.

The war on marijuana has therefore not let up - nor has the federal
government conceded that classifying it in the same category as heroin
(when it is less physically harmful than alcohol) is just absurd.

Into this welter of hypocrisy and racial double standards came first a
Trojan horse. For patients in chemotherapy, smoking marijuana was by
far the most effective way to combat nausea. A manufactured pill tried
to reproduce the effect but it did not work as well as the smoke. So
"medical marijuana laws" spread around the country. Cannabis could not
be used for pleasure  but it could be used to alleviate pain.

It was a compromise doomed to fail. In California, doctors prescribed
cannabis for almost anyone who could credibly claim a bad back or a
bad day at work. On the boardwalk of Venice Beach, a suburb of Los
Angeles, the offices of "marijuana doctors" became more common than
Starbucks.

This year activists in two western states, Colorado and Washington,
rebranded pot legalisation as a conservative measure. The campaign in
Colorado centred around a single word: safer. The argument was not
just that pot was basically harmless and non-addictive for adults, but
that it was actively harmful to teens with developing brains. Under
prohibition, your kids could easily get marijuana. But if pot were
regulated the way alcohol is, parents would have more chance of
keeping their children away from it.

The activists put a simple measure on the ballot to legalise, regulate
and tax cannabis  and it passed. The same strong rules apply for pot
as for alcohol: strict enforcement of a ban for those under 21, for
driving while stoned and so on. There will be no free-for-all. The
Colorado movement is highly conservative, approving every dispensary
over time, ensuring that everything is done by the letter of the law.

There is one twist: the law allows anyone to grow a certain amount of
the plant in their gardens. This makes it almost impossible for the
federal government to shut down the legal pot industry in the state.

So one senses the beginning of an end to the era of marijuana
prohibition in America. Some 73 per cent of Americans favour
legalising medical marijuana and, for the first time, a narrow
majority support full legalisation. Among the young the majority is
overwhelming. Two states have legalised it completely while 18 others,
including Washington, have legal medical marijuana.

The money to be made is staggering. Entrepreneurs in Colorado will
make a fortune selling varieties of the stuff and the state of
Colorado will benefit from the taxation it desperately needs. One
estimate suggests it will be worth US$100 million (NZ$123m) a year to
state authorities by 2017. Instead of that money going to drug
cartels, it goes into education and healthcare and roads.

So far there has been a mute reaction from the Obama Administration.
Maybe the former member of the Choom Gang - who has kept his distance
on this issue and cast it away as part of his wayward youth - is
leading from behind again. And the states, as every conservative
federalist would love, are leading from the front.
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MAP posted-by: Matt