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Absurdities Of The Drug War

Freddie’s frustration with Obama’s dismissive response to the large number of online questions about marijuana legalization is understandable, but it seems to me that legalization arguments will never gain much traction if advocates for it are constantly having to mention how they are not like the drug’s stereotypical users or regard the drug’s use as […]

Freddie’s frustration with Obama’s dismissive response to the large number of online questions about marijuana legalization is understandable, but it seems to me that legalization arguments will never gain much traction if advocates for it are constantly having to mention how they are not like the drug’s stereotypical users or regard the drug’s use as some grievous personal failing. Instead of coming across as a stronger argument, the standard “I’m in favor of legalization, and I’m the farthest thing in the world from a pot smoker!” argument ends up making the argument for legalization less compelling. This is because this kind of argument unintentionally reproduces the stigma against the drug and effectively endorses one of the key claims that supporters of criminalization make. While it is true that there are a great many practical and principled reasons why Americans of all stripes should oppose continued criminalization, for legalization to take hold as something more than a marginal issue that has the sympathies of more than relatively marginal political forces there would need to be a much larger constituency that regards criminalization as an intolerable imposition on one of their preferences.

Opponents of Prohibition in the ’20s and early ’30s were not called “wets” simply to dismiss or mock them, but to describe accurately that they wanted to be able to drink alcohol legally. A significant cultural obstacle that marijuana legalization faces is that even many leading advocates of legalization will decry the drug as unusually unhealthy and there are relatively few people who would use the drug once legalized who do not already use it. The irony of legalization is that it would probably lead to such a small increase in use of the drug that there is no large, untapped base of support to make support for continued criminalization a political liability. Criminalization is unusually irrational in this case, but there are not enough people directly inconvenienced or hassled by the criminalization of the drug to make politicians pay any price for supporting the status quo. On the other side, there is a fairly large number of people who remain committed to defending that status quo and penalizing politicians who entertain supporting legalization.

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