Steve Sailer observes that in California, where he lives, cigarette smoking is Bad, but pot smoking has taken on the air of, well, goodness. Excerpt:

As the marijuana legalization movement strengthens, you can see hints of how hard it is to hit the libertarian sweet spot where something is simultaneously legalized but remains rare and distasteful. People, especially young people, pick up messages from society about what is winning and what is losing more than they pick up nuanced messages. Smoking tobacco is losing so it seems reasonable to ban smoking it even in your own car while driving through a brushfire zone. Smoking marijuana is winning, so it doesn’t seem like the ban on smoking in Laurel Canyon applies to dope.

It’s all about class, don’t you think? Except for teenagers and college students, who are expected to be stupid about this stuff, cigarette smoking is increasingly associated with downscale trashiness. But as Sailer points out, there’s smoking, and there’s smoking. In our emerging social taboos, somehow, inhaling burning marijuana fumes into your lungs does not carry with it the taboo that inhaling burning tobacco smoke does. And this dynamic also applies to pornography, Sailer writes.