THE HARSH TASTE OF PROGRESS

Posters have gone up in Washington bus shelters and underground stations in
recent months, urging commuters to "Enjoy better sex: legalise and tax
marijuana." The posters are sponsored by Change the Climate, one of two
large lobbying operations urging Americans to reassess whether pot-smoking
should be a criminal offence. (The other is Norml, the National
Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.)

In spite of their misleading argument - for surely it is the smoking of
marijuana, not the taxation of it, that delivers the alleged aphrodisiac
kick - the posters have made many middle-aged Americans think about pot for
the first time since university.

Worldwide, marijuana has not enjoyed such prestige for three decades.

In July, Canada began permitting doctors to prescribe cannabis, as Germany
and Australia do already. The Netherlands followed suit in September. In
several cases working their way through Ontario courts, judges are deciding
whether Canada's marijuana laws pass constitutional scrutiny at all, given
that the government has, in effect, declared the drug a medicine. Spurred
by such concerns, Canada's parliament is rushing to decriminalise
possession of 15 grammes of pot or less.

On the surface, the US appears to buck this trend. The Bush administration
has favoured prosecuting doctors who prescribe marijuana. The Federal
Bureau of Investigation recorded 723,000 pot arrests in 2001, double the
number of a decade ago. But such figures may reflect not the public's
intolerance but the drug's popularity, as Washington finds itself at odds
with local authorities across the country.

At the state level, the estimated 18m Americans who regularly smoke pot
have won significant victories. Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado,
Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington all have medical marijuana
laws. At a September forum during the California governors' race, the
candidates were unanimous on only one thing: keeping medical marijuana legal.

In Seattle, 58 per cent of voters passed a law ordering police to assign
the arrest of pot-smokers their lowest priority. According to Keith Stroup,
executive director of Norml: "We have essentially won the hearts and minds
of the American public."

Not so fast, others might argue: wherever marijuana has made advances in
recent years, it has done so as a medicine, not as a means of getting
stoned. Legally, this is true; practically, it is hard to separate patients
from recreational users. The list of people authorised to smoke pot tends
to lengthen. Dutch law, for instance, allows pot to be prescribed for
cancer, HIV, multiple sclerosis and Tourette's syndrome; but activists are
urging that glaucoma and migraines, Crohn's disease and chronic neuropathy
be added to the list.

In the US, where many medical-marijuana laws allow authorised users to grow
their own drugs, telling patients from pot-heads is even harder. A new law
in Maryland allows marijuana defendants to argue for nominal sentences if
they can show that they have any condition for which the drug could be
prescribed. As one giddy Maryland lawyer said last week, "How many people
out there don't have any kind of physical pain that marijuana might alleviate?"

Some people will continue to serve time: a California man who claimed he
was growing marijuana to treat a wrestling injury recently got 18 months in
jail - though it probably did not help that he was growing a 100-bush
orchard of the stuff and had a semi-automatic handgun in his pocket when
arrested. But, barring such circumstances, it is hard to imagine an
HIV-positive person, or one who has ever had cancer, being convicted on a
marijuana charge.

The medical basis for the marijuana campaign is in striking contrast to
similar movements in the 1970s. Back then, the agitation to decriminalise
grass was overtly hedonistic and was carried out in the context of a
society-wide easing of restrictions on all manner of vices and
nonconformities. Today's bid for liberal marijuana laws takes place in the
context of an uninterrupted crackdown, in virtually every western country,
on other illegal drugs.

Not to mention legal ones. The western jihad against cigarette-smoking
continues to spread, even to the most unlikely venues: Israeli restaurants,
Italian airports, Irish pubs. Alcohol is no different. Scandinavia now has
zero-tolerance drink-driving laws. France is enforcing its own, for
practically the first time, as part of President Jacques Chirac's campaign
against reckless driving. America's National Academy of Sciences devotes
vast resources to measuring "teenage binge drinking".

In late September, a UK Cabinet Office study warned that booze cost British
workers 14m missed work days a year. No one is scrutinising marijuana's
effects nearly so closely .

There is a strange bifurcation of criteria. We now take a puritanical view
of traditional intoxicants such as alcohol and tobacco and a libertine view
of non-traditional ones such as marijuana. How come? One answer is common
sense: marijuana is simply a far less dangerous drug. You could legalise it
tomorrow across the UK, say, and still not wind up with the 1m annual
casualty-ward visits that the British Association for the Advancement of
Science attributes to alcohol.

But surely part of the appeal of the marijuana movement is that it defies
common sense. In today's self-doubting west, the most energetic politics is
dedicated to stopping the runaway train of progress that the west set in
motion. We see this in green, gay, anti-colonial, anti-globalisation,
animal rights and feminist politics, all of which aim to throw into reverse
longstanding western preferences and power arrangements.

In their minor way, alcohol and tobacco are vulnerable precisely because
they are proper to our culture; marijuana gets a pass because it is not.

The most deep-seated values are delegitimised by the very fact of their
having been formed in the first place. Whatever the people who brought us
slavery, the Gulag and the hydrogen bomb did, we want to do the opposite.
Right down to our choice of intoxicants.