FREE WEEDS

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it
should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can
evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when
conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort
to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.

The laws concerning marijuana aren't exactly indefensible, because
practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the
course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana,
moved on to severe mental disorder.

But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that
every rapist began by masturbating.

General rules based on individual victims are unwise.

And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using
marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who
give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend.

If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone
caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or -- exulting in
life in the paradigm -- committing adultery.

Send them all to Guantanamo?

Legal practices should be informed by realities.

These are enlightening in the matter of marijuana.

There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very
year. Most of these -- 87 percent -- involve nothing more than mere
possession of small amounts of marijuana.

This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10 billion to $15 billion per
year in direct expenditures alone.

Most transgressors caught using marijuana aren't packed away to jail,
but some are, and in Alabama, if you are convicted three times of
marijuana possession, they'll lock you up for 15 years to life.
Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in
National Review, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans
currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.

What we face is the politician's fear of endorsing any change in
existing marijuana laws. You can imagine what a call for reform in
those laws would do to an upward mobile political figure.

Gary Johnson, as governor of New Mexico, came out in favor of
legalization -- and went on to private life. George Shultz, former
secretary of state, long ago called for legalization, but he was not
running for office, and at his age, and with his distinctions, he is
immune to slurred charges of indifference to the fate of children and
humankind.

But Kurt Schmoke, as mayor of Baltimore, did it, and survived a
re-election challenge.

But the stodgy inertia most politicians feel is up against a creeping
reality. It is that marijuana for medical relief is a movement that is
attracting voters who are pretty assertive on the subject.

Every state ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana has been
approved, often by wide margins.

Of course we have here collisions of federal and state authority.

Federal authority technically supervenes state laws, but federal
authority in the matter is being challenged on grounds of medical
self-government. It simply isn't so that there are substitutes equally
efficacious. Richard Brookhiser, the widely respected author and
editor, has written on the subject for the New York Observer. He had a
bout of cancer and found relief from chemotherapy only in marijuana --
which he consumed, and discarded after the affliction was gone.

The court has told federal enforcers that they are not to impose their
way between doctors and their patients, and one bill sitting about in
Congress would even deny the use of federal funds for prosecuting
medical marijuana use. Critics of reform do make a pretty plausible
case when they say that whatever is said about using marijuana only
for medical relief masks what the advocates are really after, which is
legal marijuana for whoever wants it.

That would be different from the situation today.

Today we have illegal marijuana for whoever wants it. An estimated 100
million Americans have smoked marijuana at least once, the great
majority abandoning its use after a few highs.

But to stop using it does not close off its availability. A Boston
commentator observed years ago that it is easier for an 18-year-old to
get marijuana in Cambridge than to get beer. Vendors who sell beer to
minors can forfeit their valuable licenses.

It requires less effort for the college student to find marijuana than
for a sailor to find a brothel. Still, there is the danger of arrest
(as 700,000 people a year will tell you), of possible imprisonment, of
blemish on one's record.

The obverse of this is increased cynicism about the law.

We're not going to find someone running for president who advocates
reform of those laws. What is required is a genuine republican
groundswell. It is happening, but ever so gradually.

Two of every five Americans, according to a 2003 Zogby poll cited by
Dr. Nadelmann, believe "the government should treat marijuana more or
less the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control
it, tax it, and make it illegal only for children." Such reforms would
hugely increase the use of the drug? Why? It is de facto legal in the
Netherlands, and the percentage of users there is the same as here.
The Dutch do odd things, but here they teach us a lesson.