The Pot President

Hendrik Hertzberg on the hypocrisy of the hip.

In a blog post at the New Yorker last week, Hendrik Hertzberg spotlighted a recent joke made by the President of the United States at the White House Correspondents dinner. In reference to the rapidly changing media landscape, Obama said: “You can’t keep up with it. I mean, I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around two A.M. (Laughter.) It’s true! (Laughter.)”

The days of expressing a cringing contrition for your “youthful experimentation,” or claiming that you didn’t inhale, or clearly over.

But of course, the president’s joke wasn’t really that funny. Hertzberg cites statistics from Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, suggesting that “from fifty to a hundred thousand Americans are behind bars for pot, and only pot, on any given night.” The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) disputes those figures, but the point is not so much whose numbers are closer to the truth, but rather the simple fact that while the president made his joke, too many people are locked up in federal and state prisons for an offense that a growing number of states are backing away from enforcing.

As Hertzberg put it, the subtext of the president’s pot joke was that it “allowed the tuxedoed, evening-gowned, middle-aged audience at the Washington Hilton to feel, for a precious moment, hip. The subtext was that smoking pot, whether a lot or a little, is just a normal part of growing up…. Nor has it done much to blight the lives of the other people in the Hilton ballroom, most of whom, like the rest of the media, political, and Hollywood elites, have smoked pot, too.”

Obama, they say, was a champ stoner in school. He was, writes David Maraniss in his biography of Obama, skilled at “interceptions”—sneaking an extra hit off the joint when it hadn’t gotten all the way around yet.  Obama, writes Hertzberg, really ought to feel “a smidgen of shame that the government he heads treats people who do exactly what he used to do, and now casually jokes about, as criminals.”

We haven’t heard much lately about the Boomer hypocrisy inherent in such roomfuls of high achievers who used to get high. (Some of them still do.) Jobs and reputations and bank loans are not endangered by these sly references and knowing winks. What hurts jobs and reputations is a stretch in federal prison—the unwilling route taken by many less fortunate Americans.

Hertzberg is wrong when he says that “marijuana-associated suffering enters the picture only when prohibition does.” Like most pro-legalization commentators, he does not mention addiction liability, or lasting cognitive effects on younger smokers.  But it is true that a disproportionate amount of suffering is caused by marijuana prohibition laws. The farthest corners of the debate are staked out, but decriminalization—the missing middle ground—still offers society a more balanced starting point than full-tilt legalization. Merriam-Webster says that to decriminalize is “to repeal a strict ban on, while keeping under some form of regulation.” State policy makers, although they don’t use the term very often, are pursuing what amounts to decriminalization. Nobody other than world-peace-through-weed zealots is arguing for a repeat of the track record with cigarettes (a drug in the process of being re-criminalized). And the regulation of alcohol does not offer a compelling model for marijuana’s future as a semi-legal drug. Happily, marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as alcohol or nicotine, so that helps.

It might surprise some readers to know that a majority of the Dutch aren’t interested in legalizing marijuana. They are concerned about keeping it out of the hands of minors. They’re not very happy with the trend towards higher and higher levels of THC. This is expressed in the fact that marijuana is, and likely will remain, illegal in The Netherlands. The narrow coffee shop exception is misleading in this regard. It was not designed to make marijuana more acceptable, but to deal creatively with the problem of street sales. You almost never see a drug deal going down on the streets of Amsterdam. That’s because a) It’s stupid, you can just waltz into a coffee shop if you’re over 21. b) Dealers have a hard time beating coffee shop prices. c) Dutch police come down heavily on street dealers.  Why? See a) above. The Dutch are no freer to wander their canal-lined streets with a joint in hand than Americans are free to wander Capitol Mall Boulevard with an open bottle of Jack.

Now that’s decriminalization. And an unfair comparison, of course, since the Dutch nation is so much smaller and more homogenous than the U.S. But lately, the talk has been about states, not the country at large. And at the state level, some of the Dutch lessons may apply.

What should our president do about all of this? Hertzberg has three proposals:

—Tell the Justice Department to “end the absurd classification of marijuana as a supremely dangerous Schedule I drug, like heroin.” Alcohol, let us recall, does not have a drug classification because it is not a scheduled substance at all. This American ambivalence is reflected by the names of the country’s premier drug research groups, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the Monty Pythonesque National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

—Promise to “avoid making life unnecessarily difficult” for the states that have made provisions for medical marijuana or legalization.

—Change the name of the Drug Czar’s Office of National Drug Control Policy to something like the “Office of National Harm Reduction Drug Policy.”

Adopting any or all of these changes would be a useful step toward a decriminalized future for marijuana. Here’s the essential point: We have to make a space for marijuana use in American culture. I mean above the ground, and unassociated with jail time. While still murky from a medical point of view, there is just no doubting that millions of Americans prefer pot to alcohol as a recreational drug. Given alcohol’s role in the American death toll, and the lack of any such grim trail of the dead in marijuana’s case, there’s no shame in that decision, from my point of view.

Graphics Credit: http://www.anonymousartofrevolution.com/

Clock Ticking On Colorado’s Marijuana Repeal Bill

Proposal to revote on pot legalization is losing steam.

While the rest of the nation argues over Colorado’s recent decision to legalize limited amounts of marijuana, a small but determined group of legislators in that state have been promoting a bill that would allow a “conditional repeal” of the pot amendment.

The proposal to resubmit the question of retail marijuana sales to Colorado voters is supported by Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) and Senate Minority Leader Bill Cadman (R-Colorado Springs).* The proposed ballot measure would first ask voters to approve previously promised higher tax rates on marijuana. On April 29, the Colorado House passed a bill placing a 15% excise tax and a 10% sales tax on marijuana, and came up with the idea of submitting the plan to the voters as a ballot proposal. If the higher tax doesn’t pass, citizens would then be asked whether retail sales should be repealed.  “People voted for marijuana and tax,” said State Senator Morse, “and what they got was marijuana and we’ll see if they get the tax."

Republican Senator Larry Crowder (R-Alamosa) and others point to the fact that Amendment 64 called for $40 million in new excise taxes for state school funds, in addition to the legal cultivation of 6 plants and possession of a ounce or less. “So if there’s no money,” Crowder told a Denver TV station, “we shouldn’t have marijuana.”

“The marijuana legalization repeal — or suspension — proposal would also have to be approved by voters,” according to the Denver Post. “But, before it could reach the ballot, it would need two-thirds support in the Capitol because it would change a provision of Colorado's constitution.”

Today is the last day that House Bill 1380 can move forward in the final hours of Colorado’s legislative session, a disheartening prospect for marijuana supporters, faced with the notion of fighting the fight all over again. The Boulder Weekly called it “a sneak attack on Amendment 64.” But it appears that most of the steam has leaked out of the repeal drive. Rep. Dan Pabon (D-Denver) told the Post that “there was a pretty strong grassroots response that I think every member received that said, 'Don't threaten us.'"

Here’s how SMART Colorado, a group opposing legalization, puts the argument: “Amendment 64 raised the possibility of new taxes on marijuana but didn’t enact them. If voters don’t now approve new taxes on marijuana, Colorado’s budget will take a major hit and Amendment 64 will have exactly the opposite effect from what was promised voters.”

Supporters of state legalization claim the legislators are trying to change the rules in midstream, by asking voters to approve a sales tax that is higher than necessary. Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project claims the move amounts to “extortion of the voters. They’re being told they must approve a higher tax level proposed by legislators or otherwise the constitutional amendment they adopted in November will be repealed.”

The measure’s chances are slim in the Colorado legislature—a group altogether mindful of the 55% margin by which voters passed the original amendment.

Meanwhile, in the state of Washington, legalization plans ran up against a major hurdle when it was discovered that the current law defines marijuana, the drug, as anything with more than 0.3 % THC content. Unfortunately for the state’s crime lab, that bar is so low that law enforcement actions against large grower operations and possession of large quantities would founder over the fact that most of what cops seized would be defined, in effect, as hemp. Yes, the state of Washington managed to criminalize the large-scale possession of hemp, so the House and Senate quietly scrambled to re-criminalize large-scale marijuana possession, not hemp possession, by defining THC content more scientifically.

This is only a snapshot of the regulatory issues that await attention in Washington and Colorado, as they attempt to become the first states to navigate new waters and divorce themselves from federal drug policy imperatives. There is still a very long way to go. In a speech in Mexico City last Friday, President Obama firmly closed the door on the idea that the feds might be persuaded to support state marijuana legalization efforts.

*Late Monday night, the bill's sponsors backed off, and the marijuana repeal proposal died for lack of support.

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