Pot, Booze, and Caifornia's Prop. 19

California voters will decide in November whether personal use of marijuana should be legal.

In my previous post, I referred to a film called Saving Grace, in which a character asks a simple question: Does the fact that alcohol is mostly legal but marijuana is mostly not have more to do with the accidents of history than any qualitiative difference in the relative experiences of intoxication offered by the two drugs?

The debate over Proposition 19 in California provides an instructive case in point. Prop 19 would legalize marijuana possession for personal use. Fearing the competition from pot, distributors of booze have made substantial financial contributions to oppose it.

As the blogger Scott Greenfield points out in his post in Simple Justice, the self-interested motivation of such contributions is crystal clear. With only so many dollars-chasing-intoxicants to go around, purveyors of licquor stand to lose by the legalization of cannabis consumption.

Stirring the Pot

Is the fact that alcohol is mostly legal and marijuana is mostly not merely an accident of history that has relatively little to do with the actual effects of each drug?

The amusing English comedy, Saving Grace, poses this question in lighthearted cinematic form, leavened with heavy doses of whimsy and featuring some rather remarkable displays of marijuana plants. The filmmakers stir the pot - pun totally intended - with quirky Cornish characters, dubious London drug dealers, and a sure-fire performance by Brenda Blethyn as a widow left deep in debt by her late husband's fraud.



The question at hand is what will happen when the widow turns to large-scale cannabis cultivation, hoping to get herself out of the financial quagmire. The widow's name is Grace, but the film doesn't really explore the theological implications of the word. Maybe the filmmakers thought calling her Mary Jane would be too bad of a pun.

Willie Nelson Makes a Case for Legalizing Weed

At age 77, after six decades on the road, Willie Nelson is an American icon. He's sold fifty million albums, made a slew of movies, and given freely of himself to charitable causes. Even if you don't dig country music, or remember his efforts to organize the Farm Aid concerts a quarter century ago, you've probably heard snippets of his signature song, On the Road Again.

Just in time for the Fourth of July, Parade magazine ran a cover story on Willie recounting his gripping life story. Raised by grandparents during the Great Depression, he has experienced three failed marriages, the suicide of a son, numerous drug busts, and tense tangles with the IRS. Today, however, according to the Parade account, he has found, with his fourth wife, Annie, 50, a level of tranquility he had never previously known.

Willie Nelson believes that his new-found tranquility also has something to do with cutting way back on alcohol consumption and partaking freely of cannabis. In fact, this American icon is an articulate spokesperson for the legalization of marijuana.

"Legalize weed. It's 50 percent of what's causing the problems along the border with the drug cartels. A lot of people who sell it want to keep it illegal because that's where the money is. The cartels are now in hundreds of our cities, growing and selling weed. Legalize it, and it would stop all that immediately."

Is this reasoning sound?

40 Years of the "War on Drugs"

President Nixon started it forty years ago with $100 million in federal funds, when hippies were passing bongs around and soliders were coming home from Nam hooked on heroin.

It's escalated ever since, to gargantuan proportions. According to a recent AP analysis, the tab now stands at $15.1 billion per year, with a cumulative total of approximately $1 trillion spent.

$1 trillion! A few billion here, a few billion there . . . and pretty soon we're talking about real money. (For example, the AP estimates that about $33 million went to "just say no" educational messages of the type closely associated with Nancy Reagan.)

The Obama administration proposes to treat drug problems with a more holistic strategy, as matter of public health as much as criminal justice. Drug policy coordinator (aka "czar") Gil Kerlikowske argues that busting drug dealers and cutting off drugs at the border only take you only so far, if you don't tackle the underlying addiction that drives the demand.

This makes sense to me, and I'm hoping we can finally turn the drug policy Titanic around. We hit the metaphorical iceberg a full generation ago, after the drug overdose death of college basketball star Len Bias and political opportunism occasioned draconian increases in federal drug sentences. They've never really been rolled back, and the AP estimates there have been 37 million nonviolent drug offenders arrested since the war began. Ten million of those were for marijuana possession.

And of course it usually doesn't stop with arrest; many are jailed or imprisoned. In 2009, half of the inmates in federal prisons were there for drug offenses, and it's cost $450 billion over the last forty years to house this population. That's almost half of the $1 trillion right there.

Yet somehow the national crackdown has staggered on, a self-perpetuating, somnambulist exercise in counter-productivity. (Some will say, "Ah, but the problem would have been so much worse without the War on Drugs." To me, that is a preposterous argument, akin to saying, in 1975, during the helicopter evacutation of the embassy in Saigon, "Ah, but we would have won in Vietnam, if we'd just sent in more troops." Some wars are misconceived from the very beginning, and their failure should not surprise us.

So to the crowded reform agenda: health care, immigration, financial services, add one more: criminal justice reform. And it starts with casting a cold eye on the War on Drugs and its deeply problematic consequences.