THE STONER'S DILEMMA

Paint out an exaggerated caricature of the Left and you are likely to
find among "Bible-burning," "latte-drinking," and "tax-raising" the
common epithet "pot-smoking." A well-stuffed joint is, apparently, a
familiar staple in the progressive's quiver alongside a Che shirt and
a burning American flag. Unfortunately, marijuana as political issue
goes better to the tune of "Puttin' on the Ritz" than "The
Internationale," for drug consumption, even if it frees minds,
shackles the lower class into economic bondsmanship.

It is disingenuous and regressive to attack the "degenerate habit" of
marijuana from a cultural stand, as conservatives frequently do. It is
hard to argue that the puffs of pot that waft out of college
dormitories are inculcating slothfulness or Marxism among developing
generations. It is even harder to attack pot from a cultural
standpoint when it is hardly the exclusive domain of young people;
when presidential candidates can openly admit their use of the drug
without consequence, it is clear enough that the mainstreaming of pot
is complete. While the aesthetic horror of a lazy smoking hippie may
still be an effective bogeyman for the farthest-right conservatives,
most Americans correctly realize that marijuana is a fairly innocent
drug.

What most of them don't realize, though, is how utterly irresponsible
pot is when viewed from a broader social perspective. We live in an
age where the Left has wisely and effectively turned their efforts
toward influencing society through the marketplace. There are few
consumer goods left which do not have some sort of
socially-responsible alternatives. Bananas are sold with the promise
that their pickers were paid and housed decently, automobiles are sold
with the promise that they will sip gingerly on gas, retailers market
their community activism, and even mutual funds tout their responsible
investments. Our accouterments are now accountable from the point
where they were dug out of the earth to the point that they arrive at
our table.

Yet most of the same people who insist that their apples are local,
their bankers tolerant, their handbags messianic, and their maids
affluent seem perfectly comfortable propping up the demand side of a
trade which forces thousands of Americans into a life at the margins
of society. Between all of their insistences that pot doesn't hurt
people, they seem to have forgotten that the stuff has to come from
somewhere. And this is quite a large omission to make.

The legal differential between consumers and suppliers of marijuana is
enormous. Middle- and upper-class users of pot face essentially no
consequences for their actions. Law enforcement across the country
generally looks in the other direction when teenagers listening to the
Flaming Lips (or their parents listening to Big Brother & The Holding
Company) toke up in the evenings. When they do run into trouble, legal
help is easy and effective. Nobody worries too much about serving hard
time for smoking pot at home, and even hard-nosed stalwarts of the law
have given up on prosecuting every offense of petty possession. At
Harvard, certainly, we're more likely to get into trouble for covering
up our fire extinguisher to keep it from squawking at the smoke than
we are from smoking the pot itself.

For growers and distributors, though, the situation is different
entirely. They form the linemen of a vast American underclass of crime
and poverty. Their entire lives are, by and large, extralegal. They do
not donate to politicians and they do not vote. Their trade demands
that they shed their citizenry, that they give up the privileges and
protections of society for them and their families. The law does not
demur to strip away their freedom, and they fill up the ranks of
inmates in wild overproportion--over 55 percent of the federal prison
population is incarcerated for drug offenses.

And this legal differential mirrors a class differential. Most drug
dealers are not recent economics graduates, and most freshly-minted
MBAs do not consider a career in dealing alongside their offers from
McKinsey & Co. and Goldman Sachs. They are made up mostly of
desperately poor people--people for whom the inflated demand of pot
represents a rare economic opportunity in a world where jobs are
scarce and education scarcer.

Yet we continue to smoke our pot, liberally, as it were, missing among
its innocent curls of smoke the sinister economic system that it sets
up. One cannot sneer at the social irresponsibility of a Hummer driver
and then return home to relax over a joint whose procurement demanded
the subjection of an impoverished underclass on the fringes of society.

This is, of course, not an argument against the legalization of
marijuana. Perhaps there is a legitimate argument to be made that all
of these problems could be easily dissolved by legal sanction for the
drug trade. But until that point comes, we light up with the legal
system we have, not the legal system we wish we had, and we cannot
merely pretend that our actions have no consequences.

So perhaps a measure of consumer responsibility ought to make its way
over to the liberal-minded drug users of our country. And perhaps we
should insert into our caricature of the pot smoker the fat cigar of
the plutocrat.