MARIJUANA MADNESS

What's with marijuana enthusiasts' blind spot toward free
speech?

Last Friday, you may recall, a noisy swarm of pro-pot protesters
associated with the group Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation
disrupted speeches by state officials who oppose Amendment 44, which
would legalize possession of up to an ounce. For a while their clamor
actually drowned out Attorney General John Suthers.

The News quickly denounced this assault on freedom in an editorial,
pointing out that state officials had a permit for their rally and
enjoyed a fundamental right to speak, whatever a mob of self-righteous
bullies might have thought.

Even some protesters must later have realized their mistake - in terms
of disastrous PR, if nothing else.

So imagine my surprise when Allen St. Pierre, executive director of
the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws, e-mailed me this week to rail against the protest's
critics.

"I'm genuinely dismayed," he wrote, "to see the Rocky Mountain News'
editorial board chose to highlight Governor (Bill) Owens' disgusting
slur rather than one hundred and fifty Coloradans' righteous and angry
tones confronting prevaricating politicians . . ."

St. Pierre, who witnessed the protest, seems to believe the First
Amendment does not apply to anyone who utters what he considers a
dangerous lie.

Still, St. Pierre does make one defensible point, which he reiterated
to me in a subsequent conversation. He complains that Owens was out of
line in comparing the protesters to "brownshirts" - aka Nazi storm
troopers. And to be fair, the Nazi analogy in contemporary America is
almost always a stretch.

So let's concede that SAFER protesters were by no means the modern
equivalent of Ernst Rohm's SA. A more generic term will have to do for
those who deny freedom of speech to their fellow citizens.

My humble vote is for "fascists."