Pubdate: Wed, 08 Jan 2014
Source: New York Post (NY)
Copyright: 2014 N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc.
Contact: http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/letters/letters_editor.htm
Website: http://www.nypost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/296
Author: Jacob Sullum

POT PROHIBITIONISTS' PATHETIC POINTS

ON Monday, less than a week after Colorado's state-licensed marijuana 
shops began serving recreational consumers, the anti-pot group 
Project SAM thanked three public figures who "have galvanized our movement."

One of them was Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair, The New 
Yorker and The Daily Beast, whose contribution consisted of this 
insight, offered to her 75,000 Twitter followers last Friday: "Legal 
weed contributes to us being a fatter, dumber, sleepier nation even 
less able to compete with the Chinese."

This is what passes for smart commentary among pot prohibitionists.

Colorado's path-breaking legalization of the marijuana business has 
revealed the intellectual bankruptcy of people who think violence is 
an appropriate response to the consumption of psychoactive substances 
they don't like.

People like Kevin Sabet, the former Office of National Drug Control 
Policy official who co-founded Project SAM. Sabet's main strategy for 
defending prohibition consists of pairing the word "big" with the 
word "marijuana," based on the assumption that Americans will flee in 
terror from the resulting phrase.

"We're on the brink of creating Big Marijuana," Sabet warns. That's 
scary, he explains, because large, legal cannabusinesses will 
advertise their product and encourage people to consume it. Even so, 
they seem preferable to murderous drug cartels.

Sabet's group clearly needs all the help it can get. In addition to 
Brown's tweet, it latched onto a pair of essays published the day 
after Colorado's pot shops opened. New York Times columnist David 
Brooks and Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, both of whom admit 
enjoying marijuana in their younger days, nevertheless oppose 
legalization because some people smoke pot too much, which is 
especially bad when those people are teenagers.

Brooks concedes that smoking pot with his buddies in high school was 
"fun," even that "those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our 
friendships." Still, "being stoned is not a particularly uplifting 
form of pleasure." And then there was that time Brooks smoked pot 
during lunch and flubbed a presentation in English class, "feeling 
like a total loser."

"I don't have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to 
time," Brooks says, but "smoking all the time" is "likely to 
cumulatively fragment a person's deep center, or at least not do much 
to enhance it." Therefore, the government should "subtly tip the 
scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship" by 
kidnapping people at gunpoint and locking them in cages for growing 
or selling marijuana.

Brooks, keen to protect his deep center and avoid embarrassing public 
speaking incidents, doesn't care for pot anymore. But Marcus admits, 
"I have done my share of inhaling," and she plans to "check out some 
Bubba Kush" the next time she is in Colorado.

Still, she thinks she shouldn't be allowed to do that - because of 
the kids. "The more widely available marijuana becomes," she writes, 
"the more minors will use it."

Marcus concedes that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol or 
tobacco. "The reason to single out marijuana," she says, "is the 
simple fact of its current (semi-) illegality." In other words, 
marijuana should be illegal because it is illegal. I believe this is 
an example of what philosophers call the is/ought fallacy.

What Brooks and Marcus conspicuously fail to do is offer a moral 
justification for banning marijuana but not alcohol (which poses 
greater hazards when consumed to excess and is consumed by minors a 
lot more often), plus every other adult pleasure that Brooks deems 
insufficiently "uplifting." They don't even seem to understand that a 
moral justification is needed for using force to suppress an activity 
that violates no one's rights.

With allies and arguments like these, it's no wonder the 
prohibitionists are losing. A few days after Brown, Brooks and Marcus 
galvanized the anti-pot movement with their thrilling defenses of the 
status quo, CNN announced poll results indicating that 54 percent of 
Americans think "the sale of marijuana should be made legal."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom