DAILY BEAST Column: …But has it occurred to David that the reason disapproval of other drugs has gone up and disapproval of marijuana has gone down is because people understand the difference. They know from their own experience that marijuana is harmless, compared with other legal drugs like alcohol, and certainly harmless compared with prescription drugs (20,000 deaths a year) or other street drugs. You can’t overdose on it; and it doesn’t lead to anti-social behavior, as long as you don’t count snoozing as anti-social. Meanwhile, arrests for marijuana have sky-rocketed in recent years, to 800,000. When social tolerance for something increases based on reality, and the government reacts by intensifying enforcement, you have what can only be called Prohibition. It was insane with alcohol; it is even more insane with marijuana.
What David [Frum] is fighting is a social change based on empirical reality. Which is why I believe his position on this is not a conservative, but authoritarian and even liberal in its condescension toward the decisions of ordinary people living their own lives. He needs to trust the American people more. I think of the marriage movement. Once people realized the fact that gay people are just like them, with the same emotional and psychological needs and family backgrounds, they saw no reason to deny them full inclusion in marriage. Similarly, once a critical number of sane adults understand that pot-use is of trivial concern, minimal harm and considerable pleasure, they have rightly placed it in a different category than, say cocaine or meth. Meanwhile, the government remains in la-la land.
So here’s a question for David: do you believe the government should alter its Schedule 1 classification of cannabis as having no medical use at all and in the same class as heroin? David is a believer in empiricism and rational public policy. Does he believe that pot has “no currently accepted medical use”? Does he believe that there is “a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision”? … (more)
