Three items from the recent news that even a cynical bastard
like me thought could never happen:
• Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has voluntarily turned over
the speakership to John Boehner, thereby avoiding the potentially
ugly, but totally radical spectacle of Republican stormtroopers
taking the Capitol by force.
• Nicolas Cage has somehow managed to make an even worse
movie (Season of the Witch) than his last worst movie
(The Wicker Man).
• Pat Robertson has called for legalizing pot.
As Hunter S. Thompson used to say, “We are living in
dangerously weird times.” It’s true. Last month the founder of the
Christian Broadcasting Network told his television audience that
marijuana should be decriminalized. Not because he has developed a
strange new appreciation for Cheech and Chong movies, but because,
in his words, “it’s ruining young people. Young people go into
prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened
criminals.”
There’s just one small problem: Pat was about as confused
by the facts as Kirstie Alley is by a salad fork. Evidently, the
Rev. Robertson thinks states are imprisoning teens that take a
couple hits off a joint:
We’re locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of
marijuana and next thing you know they’ve got 10 years with [a]
mandatory sentence…
FACT CHECK: No one is going to prison for a decade for a couple
puffs of the magic dragon, even with some states’ three strikes
legislation. Most felony drug convictions are for dealing the hard
stuff. Even so, it was one of those moments that makes you check
the calendar to see if it’s Opposites Day, or wonder if you took a
wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up lost in some freaky parallel
universe.
It used to be the only people calling for legal pot were
the half-baked fans of The Big Lebowski and certain Nobel
Prize-winning economists. Nowadays, the only ones who think
marijuana should not be legalized are
the uplifters in the Obama Administration, one
lawnmower mom in Dubuque, and the Beer Industry (because they
sincerely CARE ABOUT YOUR HEALTH).
More crazy — I mean controversial — is the suggestion to
legalize all dope.
ANOTHER WEIRD THING that made headlines this month was
conservative pundit and noted drug pusher John McWhorter’s piece in
the
New Republic in which he, like Britain’s former Drug Tsar
Bob Ainsworth (the Brits spell czar with a TS because it makes them
feel superior), called for the legalization of ALL drugs. McWhorter
notes that America has two major problems: drugs and race. Not to
worry, though. He has the solution for both: End the endless war on
drugs:
With no War on Drugs there would be, within one
generation, no “black problem” in the United States. If there were
no way to sell drugs on the street at a markup, then young black
men who drift into this route would instead have to get legal work.
They would. Those insisting that they would not have about as much
faith in human persistence and ingenuity as those who thought women
past their five-year welfare cap would wind up freezing on sidewalk
grates.
Here’s what we know:
Wars against social problems (poverty, drugs, illiteracy, teen
pregnancy) work about as well as Prof. Clark
Stanley’s Snake
Oil Liniment, and only slightly better than our
urban public schools. And prohibition worked only for
Al Capone. And nobody else has any ideas.
So why not give it a shot? The great fear is that
legalizing heroin, etc., will turn America into a land of useless,
leeching junkies — like Seattle. I’m not so sure I’d mind that.
Think of all the hipsters who will be too stoned to vote. Also, it
might free up a lot of jobs for people like me who don’t really
have any useful skills to begin with, so we’d be solving the
unemployment problem too.
We could try it first in my hometown of St. Louis. I say
we give it five years. If St. Louis dissolves into a kind of
dystopian nightmare where everyone becomes a gun-toting junkie and
robs everyone else to buy drugs (in other words, if it stays pretty
much the way it is now), then we can call the pilot program a
qualified success. If the situation worsens… well, how could it
possibly get any worse?
Okay, we’ve just solved this nation’s three most
intractable problems, drugs, race and unemployment. I’m off for a
beer, before the president declares war on Pabst.
