WILL POT EVER BE LEGAL IN THIS SCHIZOID COUNTRY?

Marijuana occupies a bizarrely paradoxical place in American culture.
Its use is widespread, commonplace among the young and ubiquitous in
popular culture. Yet it remains highly illegal, and talk of
legalization is usually deemed political suicide.

Here are five signs that pot should be legal soon -- and five reasons
why it probably won't.

1. Pot is indelibly a part of the cultural mainstream. The stoner
comedy Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay grossed $14.6
million in its first weekend, making it the second most popular movie
in the country. Most pro basketball players blaze, according to
sources as diverse as the ganjaphile Mavericks player Josh Howard and
the antidrug ex-Knick Charles Oakley. And on April 20, thousands of
revelers turned out at the University of Colorado and the University
of California at Santa Cruz to celebrate the 4/20 herb holiday.

As of 2002, notes Keith Stroup, legal counsel with the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 47 percent of American
adults had smoked marijuana at some time in their lives, according to
a CNN/Time poll. By today, he adds, "it is likely there are more
living Americans who have smoked marijuana than who have not.
Approximately 26 million Americans smoked marijuana just in the last
year. All of these people know it did not cause them any real harm,
and that it did not keep them from having a successful life and career."

2. Increased medical acceptance. In February, the American College of
Physicians, the second-largest medical organization in the country,
urged the federal government to move cannabis out of Schedule I, the
category for drugs with no legal medical use, "given marijuana's
proven efficacy at treating certain symptoms and its relatively low
toxicity." The group also strongly urged legal protections for doctors
who prescribe cannabis and patients who use it.

Last year, more than 3,000 articles on cannabinoids were published in
scientific journals. These have explored their possible uses for a
host of ailments, from easing the pain of arthritis to inhibiting the
growth of brain tumors.

The development of vaporization technology -- pricey devices that heat
cannabis to a point where the THC can be inhaled, but don't incinerate
the plant matter -- has eliminated one of the main reasons for doctors
to be uncomfortable about the medical use of cannabis: that smoke
contains toxic compounds. "Vaporization of THC offers the rapid onset
of symptom relief without the negative effects from smoking," the ACP
noted.

3. A federal decriminalization bill was introduced last month. HR
5843, sponsored by Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Ron Paul (R-Tex.),
would eliminate federal penalties for possession of less than 100
grams or for the nonprofit transfer of less than one ounce between
adults. The bill is the first decriminalization measure introduced in
Congress since the early 1980s.

4. The state budget crunch. With the recession battering their
treasuries, many states are taking a second look at the price of
incarcerating thousands of drug prisoners. Legal cannabis would
eliminate the costs of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing cannabis
users, growers, and dealers, and could be a major new source of tax
revenue -- especially in states like California, where it is estimated
to be the most valuable cash crop. And cannabis farming could revive
rural economies, whether by hemp production in the Great Plains or
marijuana cultivation in Appalachia.

5. There are no rational arguments against legalizing cannabis under
regulations similar to those for alcohol. I've been covering drug
issues for almost 20 years (and smoking the green since? well, I went
to Woodstock when I was 14, you do the math), and I haven't heard any.
The most common, the "gateway theory" and the idea that today's pot is
so much stronger than Woodstock-era weed that it's essentially a
different drug, are based on distortion and misinformation. They
aren't even valid rebuttable presumptions like "abortion is murder,"
"the government should not interfere with the free market by
regulating rents," or "the U.S. government had to depose Saddam
Hussein by any means necessary." And the "send a message to the
children" argument is akin to espousing the resurrection of
Prohibition because legal alcohol encourages underage drinking.

On the other hand, I strongly doubt that cannabis will become legal in
the near future, for the following reasons.

1. Pot-smokers aren't well organized. According to government surveys,
there are about 4 to 5 million regular marijuana users-roughly
speaking, people who get high at least once a week. The three leading
drug-law-reform groups would have a combined mailing list of 35,000 to
55,000 people, estimates NORML executive director Allen St. Pierre.
NORML has about 15,000 dues-paying members, 55,000 e-mail subscribers,
and 420,000 friends on its Facebook page. The Marijuana Policy Project
claims 24,000 members and 180,000 e-mail subscribers. The Drug Policy
Alliance has 26,000 members and more than 100,000 e-mail
subscribers.

Those numbers are dramatically higher than they were five years ago,
but they're still relatively small. MoveOn.org has 3.2 million people
on its e-mail list. The National Rifle Association has more than 4
million members.

2. Very few politicians support legalization. About the only
nationally known elected officials who advocate full legalization of
cannabis are Ron Paul and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)-the two
candidates most often derided as fringe lunatics in this year's
presidential race. If you stretch the list to include big-city mayors,
you'd get Gavin Newsom of San Francisco and the recently retired Rocky
Anderson of Salt Lake City. The Frank-Paul decriminalization bill's
cosponsors include both antiwar liberals and far-right
semi-libertarians, but St. Pierre believes it is unlikely to make it
out of committee this year and wouldn't get more than 85 votes if it
did. Almost all its supporters represent culturally liberal areas in
the Far West and Northeast.

"If those of us who currently smoke would take the pledge that we will
never again vote for any candidate for public office who supports
treating us like criminals, we could end prohibition within a couple
of election cycles," says Stroup. But if they did take that pledge,
"initially they would frequently only have fringe candidates whom they
could support, and would have to sit out many major races. So we can't
count on most smokers to vote based only on the candidate's position
towards treating marijuana-smokers like criminals."

3. Marijuana arrests continue at record levels. In 2006, there were
830,000 arrests for marijuana offenses-almost triple the number of
people nabbed in 1991. It was the fourth consecutive year that the
number of pot busts set a new record. Of those popped, 89 percent were
charged with simple possession.

4. Baby-boomer politicians sold us out. In the 1970s, baby-boomer
stoners believed that the laws would inevitably change when the
prohibitionist dinosaurs faded out and their generation took over.

Well, among the potheads-turned-politicians of the last 15 years, Bill
Clinton signed the law cutting off federal student aid to drug
offenders. Clarence Thomas wrote the Supreme Court decision against
medical marijuana. Barack Obama now says he is "not interested in
legalizing drugs." Al Gore, declaring that he had "put away childish
things," came out against legalizing medical marijuana. Newt Gingrich
sponsored a bill to execute pot smugglers. George W. Bush (yeah, you
expect me to believe that a raging alcoholic with a never-denied taste
for cocaine made it through the '70s without a single toke?) has
overseen federal crackdowns on headshops, bong-makers, and
medical-marijuana clinics.

5. We don't live in a rational society. In many ways, American
politics haven't changed much from 1928, when people believed that if
Al Smith, a Catholic, were elected President, he'd dig a tunnel from
the White House to the Vatican-except that now we have the Internet to
spread similar rumors. (They didn't have Photoshop in 1927, when Smith
dedicated the Holland Tunnel connecting Manhattan and Jersey City.)

We live in a society where politics are dominated by moronic
symbolism, where the media ignore government's actual effect on
working-class people in favor of pontificating endlessly about the
importance of Hillary Clinton knocking back a shot of blended whiskey
vs. Obama's abysmal bowling score, where they cast a spoiled senator's
son as a "man of the people" because he clears brush and isn't too
bright.

We live in a society ruled by fear, where people are willing to accept
having the Bill of Rights shredded in the name of fighting drugs or
"terrorism."

So it's not surprising that politicians quaver and quail at the idea
of supporting a perfectly rational change that would end the legal
harassment of millions of Americans. If they did, they'd be damned as
"trying to let drug dealers out of jail" and barraged with attack ads
accusing them of wanting to sell methamphetamine to
eight-year-olds.

There is a very powerful stereotype afoot in much of the population,
the belief that anyone "on drugs" is a brutish beast from whom all
reason hath fled, a conglomeration of the snapping-at-phantoms temper
of a rageball drunk, the stolen-goods appetite of a $500-a-day
dopefiend, the self-abasement of a crack addict performing oral sex
for a $5 rock, and the casual and calculated sadism of an '80s cocaine
kingpin ordaining "Manolo, choot this piece of chit."

Anyone who knows a pothead knows that this belief is absolutely
ludicrous, but it's what sets the tone of American political discourse
on drug issues-or more accurately, almost no one in the political
mainstream has the guts to defend drug users by pointing out that it's
propaganda.