SMOKE SCREENS Marijuana is safer than cigarettes, alcohol and driving without a seat belt but is prosecuted more viciously than all three combined. The only real tragedy of marijuana is its tendency, when used immoderately, to induce a lifestyle of volitional immobility. But simple self-discipline can easily counter this; and since marijuana isn't nearly as physically addictive as many other drugs, like nicotine, alcohol or opiates, this solution is by no means unrealistic. If people willingly allow marijuana to do what television, video games and pornography have done to so many, namely deprive them of ambition and self-control to such an extent they are unable to live productively, then that is their prerogative. Society creates its own filters. The fact most users of hard drugs began with marijuana drives the myth of marijuana being a "gateway drug." But once someone enters the illegal marketplace to obtain marijuana, he usually finds the harder drugs are just a short stroll away. The trend of moving from marijuana to harder drugs says more about the market than marijuana itself. People generally proceed from weed to acid to coke (or some other sequence) in search of an elevated state of mind. But everyone in his or her own way searches for this; the difference is only in technique. The drug user who finds promise in the mystical experience of getting high will surely be enticed to venture farther down the path of psychoactive exploration. The path only ends when the risks in obtaining and using the drugs far outweigh the pleasure or fulfillment brought about by them. By legalizing marijuana, the government would widen the gulf between the risks associated with marijuana and the risks associated with harder drugs. This would radically reduce marijuana users' interest in trying dangerous narcotics and would, in quite philistine terms, help keep our kids off crack. The most hazardous wall our brave user must scale is not the fear of consumption but the fear of breaking the law or, more accurately, of being caught. Once we've pulled marijuana use within legal boundaries, users can lay their climbing gear by the wayside and comfortably light-up to the tune of Phish's "Stash," that greatest of guitar solos in the presence of which all lovers of things psychedelic fall prostrate. The indignant pointing finger of a law, whose time and purpose have long left us and moved into the oblivion of puritanical failures, need not spoil these harmless gatherings. Now, I'm no godless heathen, but I've found the religious arguments against marijuana at best hypocritical and at worst simply vacuous. The commonly crafted religious argument claims either marijuana impairs moral discernment or the Bible denounces marijuana as sorcery (using the Greek transliteration "pharmakeia"). But one could just as easily argue the paranoia and anxiety aroused by marijuana lead to more guarded behavior and a more distinct awareness of one's own moral shortcomings. More than likely any injudicious behavior directly relates to the specific or general lawlessness of marijuana's present consumers, not to marijuana itself. Since marijuana is illegal, common sense dictates the majority of users would be, by definition, "law breakers." Therefore, samples used in studies to prove the morally debilitating effect of marijuana cannot be representative of legally sanctioned marijuana consumption. And the argument against marijuana as sorcery seems merely a hypocritical move of convenience. Because alcohol was used religiously in ancient Greece. The divinity Dionysus ("Bacchus") was referred to as Theoinos, meaning "God-wine;" and the Greek playwright Euripides wrote, "Bacchus is poured out as a libation to the gods, and through him men receive good." So why aren't the same religious attacks launched against alcohol consumption? Is it not possible most marijuana users smoke to reflect on the sum of their own knowledge and experience, not to receive some special new word from another spiritual realm? Morality is as necessary for a society to flourish as the most operative enzymes are necessary for a living organism to sustain itself. Without morality, we lose the ability to process properly the ideas and habits we as a society absorb and, consequently, end up poisoning ourselves. But the only plausible moral objection to marijuana use is it violates the law. Marijuana isn't illegal because it's wrong -- it's wrong because it's illegal. How long will we continue to subject ourselves to this cruel tautology? There may be good arguments against the legalization of marijuana, but a host of fraudulent ones is stifling them.
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