The time has come to legalize marijuana use

In 1972, President Richard Nixon ordered the creation of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. He intended thereby to justify his drug policy with empirical and scientific data couched in the idioms of medicine, sociology and criminology. He wanted a comfortable and reassuring mass of facts stamped with the imprimatur of experts and organized under a hypotaxis of preconceived conclusions advocating the continuation of current policy — proscription, prohibition, punishment and propaganda. The results vis-à-vis marijuana:

"Marihuana's relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it. This judgment is based on prevalent use patterns, on behavior exhibited by the vast majority of users and on our interpretations of existing medical and scientific data. This position also is consistent with the estimate by law enforcement personnel that the elimination of use is unattainable" (www.drugwarfacts.org).

Nixon was incensed; he disbanded the commission and disregarded its results. Nevertheless, its conclusions remain valid today. The overriding characteristic of the War on Drugs with respect to the Marijuana Front is its hilarious and maddening incongruity: simply put, the crime does not warrant the penalty, and neither does the societal impact warrant the institutional response nor does the threat-profile warrant the propaganda campaign. The government is today engaged in a supremely wasteful war on a substance utterly mismatched to the effort expended — a war whose only efficacy is psychological and whose only success is illusory. It has failed in every meaningful sense — with regard to deterrence, justice, governmental credibility and fiscal sanity. It can no longer claim to be anything except a distributed exhibition of sound and fury signifying nothing, save that "a war is being fought."

Tales of marijuana's detrimental health effects are greatly exaggerated. It is far easier to consume poisonous quantities of either potatoes or milk, these wholesome products of the American breadbasket. It is true that smoking one joint is the carcinogenic equivalent of smoking four cigarettes (due to respiratory technique), but this also means that to duplicate the familiar metric of the pack-a-day smoker a single marijuana smoker would have to smoke five joints — a feat so rare as to be commendable. In addition, it ignores the variety of mechanisms available for extracting the psychotropic properties of marijuana that bypass many of the noxious byproducts: vaporizers, teas, water-filtration devices, ingestion through baked sweets, etc. In 1988, Judge Francis L. Young wrote in a report submitted to the DEA that marijuana had been found to be one of the "safest therapeutically active substances known to man" (Part VIII, 16).

The prohibition of marijuana is materially unenforceable. The drug has become more available over time despite the expensive increase in suppressant policy on the institutional level, the legitimation of hitherto unconscionable violations of our constitutional rights and the expansion of propaganda even to the elementary schools. Any ECO100 grad can explain why the historical prohibition of alcohol was an abysmal failure, yet all such prudential logic, historical experience and straightforward application of basic economic principles vanishes when it comes to the question of the government's programmatic response to marijuana.

I have enumerated a few pragmatic reasons in support of marijuana legalization or decriminalization, but by far the most compelling is ethical. The government simply has no right to arbitrarily cancel so basic a somatic freedom. I cannot see how one can be pro-life and anti-decriminalization without dissonance or hypocrisy. The fact that this tyrannical outreach of power extends its talons through the legal force of the Commerce Clause adds insult to injury; the tenuous constitutionality of the offense exacerbates its sufferance. Some cite the apparent trivialness of the right petitioned — the right to smoke marijuana — as a limiting condition of indignation. In point of fact, so petty a restriction constitutes all the more brazen a violation inasmuch as the government's offense is frequent, ubiquitous and unquestioned on the daily level. This state of affairs serves to condition a populace to the effective and automatic negation of its rights, and it invests the natural assertion of a natural right with the tinge of illegality.

The reigning prohibition of marijuana has nothing to speak for it save the aborted cries of its historical and contemporary failures — as if any abatement or discontinuation would send "the wrong message." Such thinking recalls the behavior of Roland in the 11th century French epic, "La Chanson de Roland." Under attack by vicious hordes of Moors, Roland could not bring himself to blow his famous horn whose sounding would instantly bring help. Impelled by pride and a bizarre code of honor, he delayed use of his instrument until too late, and so perished albeit bravely (albeit foolishly).

It behooves us — ethically, pragmatically, medically — to legalize or decriminalize marijuana. End this unjust prohibition. Cease this absurd war. Break off this long extenuation of an abject failure. Dissipate this malign ideology. Roland, blow your horn! Harold Parker is a sophomore from Greenville, S.C. He can be reached at hgparker@princeton.edu.