Pot and morality

A self-described aging hippie friend posted this New Year’s message on Facebook that made me laugh, and then made me think: “Twenty years ago, if someone had told me I would live to see the day that marijuana would become legal for recreational use, gays not only were out of the closet but could legally marry, an African-American president would be elected and re-elected ... I’d have said: dream on.”

“Bring on 2014,” she wrote.

With gay people marrying, even in Utah (the Supreme Court has that on hold), pot-for-pleasure legal in Colorado and soon to be decriminalized in Washington state, and medical marijuana legal in 18 other states, two issues that once drove social morality campaigns are on their way to becoming obsolete. Not only will that profoundly change the way life is lived around America; it’s also shaking up politics and robbing the culture warriors of a rallying cry.

Weed, especially. Most of us of a certain age tend to act as if marijuana were invented with the social movements of the ’60s and ’70s. But its use is said to date back to the 3rd millennium B.C. Some entrenched attitudes, without much scientific basis, still link pot to moral decline. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently mused that Colorado voters who approved legalization were “nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.” And that’s though Brooks himself acknowledges having smoked it as a teen.

Even the discussion about legalization on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” was captioned “Freedom vs. Morality.” If smoking pot is immoral, why do alcohol and tobacco get a pass? Is it the giggles, the munchies, the association with tie-dyes and Deadheads and defying convention? Is it because marijuana has been illegal, and therefore associated with law-breaking? Wasn’t the same once true of alcohol?

The suggestion that potheads are sluggish and unmotivated would certainly make a good argument for not smoking it during the workday, or while studying. But drinking during those times can do a number on your productivity, too. Being stoned, at its worst, might cause someone to drive really slowly, but it doesn’t kill people the way drunk driving does. Isn’t that more of a moral issue?

Some Republican standard-bearers, however, are shedding the moral arguments against pot and coming down on the libertarian side, citing the expense of the drug war, among other things; it’s estimated that legalization would save $10 billion a year on enforcement. A case for legalization along those lines was made by the man who devised political strategy for the McCain/Palin Republican presidential campaign. “It should be legal and it should be taxed,” Steve Schmidt declared on “Meet the Press.” Also on the show, Democratic U.S. Rep. Donna Edwards of Maryland argued for at least decriminalization, focusing on the young minorities driven into the criminal justice system because of drugs.

Republican U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, a 2012 presidential candidate, co-sponsored a marijuana decriminalization bill with Democrat Barney Frank of Massachusetts, arguing it’s a states’ rights issue. They approach pot not as a moral, but a practical issue. So does Mexico’s former president, Vicente Fox, who has suggested the drug trade and associated crime would end if drugs were legal.

Prohibition against alcohol was repealed in 1933 with help from Pauline Sabin, a wealthy Republican who founded a women’s organization to that end. She argued that Prohibition made the nation hypocritical and undermined respect for the rule of law. She won Democrats over by pointing out that ending it would generate needed tax revenues and squelch organized crime ― arguments now being made about marijuana legalization.

Any legal recreational drug has an optimal time and place, and all are best avoided by people under 21, whose brains are still developing, making them susceptible to addiction. But those are the practical, science-based kinds of discussions we should be having.

Of course if we stop treating marijuana and homosexuality as moral issues, then morality will require different markers, and appeals to so-called values-voters will need different rallying cries. Poverty, perhaps? Human rights? Immigration reform? Global warming? Liberals and conservatives might then find themselves with more in common than what sets them apart. That happy outcome is surely something most of us would now dismiss with a “dream on.”

By Rekha Basu

Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines (Iowa) Register. Readers may send her email at rbasu@dmreg.com. ― Ed.

(Des Moines Register)

(MCT Information Services)