WHAT DRIVES COP SHOP

Every week I write the Cop Shop -- my favorite task at this paper. My
life is so boring, and some of my neighbors' lives are so interesting
in all these incredible, horrible, spectacular ways.

The Telluride cops sometimes capture, in their police reports, a side
of this town in a way official records rarely do.

Every week we brawl over little things, we pass out on the sidewalk,
we steal our roommate's stuff and pilfer little girls' bicycles.

And why are we acting so boneheaded?

It's (partly) because we are confused or frustrated, or angry or
selfish, or because life hasn't panned out the way we thought it
would. But partly it's because we are drunk.

Nothing turns regular people into criminals faster than alcohol.

Writing Cop Shop has taught me that drinking alcohol to excess
contributes to more egregious violence and stupidity and death than
pretty much anything else.

How bad is it? Cops found a guy passed out in an elevator. They
breathalyzed him, and his blood alcohol content came in at a
staggering .489. Medically, he should have been dead.

"Hold on," he told the cops when he regained consciousness. "Let me
go have one more drink. I know I can break .500."

I've done some pretty low-IQ things while drunk (putting on a coconut
bra and trying to fight a guy just for wearing a Texas cap, to cite
just one example), but the elevator guy is one sign that people drink
for the wrong reasons, to excess, not as a social lubricant or a
celebration, but to black out.

Meanwhile, every so often, someone gets caught smoking marijuana. And
every time the cops catch dope smokers, without fail, that illegal
drug causes them to do absolutely nothing that is violent, cruel,
deadly, or criminally stupid. (Sure, people do stupid things on weed.
But forgetting to show up to work is not illegal. Changing your car's
oil using Mrs. Butterworth's syrup is not illegal.)

Me, I don't like weed. It makes me Jessica Simpson-dumb and paranoid
to the point of paralysis, and when I smoke I end up cowering in my
apartment, phone off, eating Fritos and watching South Park.

But other people like it. And while it's probably not good for
anybody, there's no way it should be illegal.

This has all been said before, over and over, but it bears repeating:
marijuana doesn't hurt anything that much. And criminalizing weed, by
declaration of Congress in 1937, didn't help anything.

Americans, according to a new study, smoke more pot than residents of
countries where it is legal, including Holland. Forty-two percent of
us have tried marijuana, compared with just 20 percent of Dutch
people, even though the Dutch can buy a joint in any coffee shop, and
we all had to break the law.

Plus, all that law-breaking means that we've been jailing drug
offenders as though someone were making money off it, and now we have
more prisoners than China.

Cops around here don't write many marijuana citations. I think that
it could be because most cops, including our sage Sheriff, know the
Drug War doesn't work, and semi-secretly wish it would end.

So here's what I'd like to see on next November's ballot: legalize it.

Sure, a marijuana initiative failed three years ago. But it failed
because it was confusing, talking about "lowest law enforcement
priority" instead of saying simply: weed is legal here.

Denver did it. And nothing bad has happened. Why can't we?

A ballot initiative isn't any pressing matter. But in the same way
that small communities -- including our own -- have been pushing
climate change legislation by adopting the Kyoto Protocol on their
own, small communities can also push the debate on the War on Drugs
toward a policy that would make Americans safer, smarter and more
free, and toward a policy that might contribute to even fewer
marijuana entries in the Cop Shop, and (maybe) even less stupidity.