THE GOVERNMENT'S REEFER MADNESS

Twenty-five years ago, Lester Grinspoon noted in his classic study
"Marihuana Reconsidered" that "the single greatest risk encountered by the
user of the drug is that of being apprehended as a common criminal,
incarcerated, and subjected to untold damage to his social life and
career." What was true then is even more true today: Around 700,000
Americans are arrested annually for simply possessing marijuana, and more
than 10,000 Americans are currently in jails and prisons because they have
been convicted of marijuana possession, and no other crime.

The government's propagandists are taking full advantage of these
statistics: A new anti-drug commercial depicts the potentially devastating
arrest of a teenage marijuana smoker (drug convictions bar students from
receiving federal educational loans), and concludes: "Marijuana can get you
busted. Harmless?" The commercial's unintentionally surreal message -- that
marijuana is illegal because it's harmful, and it's harmful because it's
illegal -- is one that seems likely to fill any young person capable of
independent thought with contempt for both our marijuana laws and the
dangerously authoritarian logic that supports and enforces them.

Imagine if one were to extend this logic to, say, freedom of the press: The
government could produce commercials depicting the arrest of young people
caught reading "subversive" literature, in order to drive home the point
that, if you happen to live under a sufficiently repressive regime, merely
reading the wrong sort of book can be hazardous to your health.

Anti-drug zealots will reply that books, unlike marijuana, are harmless.
This is of course preposterous: Few things are more dangerous than books.
How many millions of deaths can be traced to the publication of "The
Communist Manifesto," or "Mein Kampf," or for that matter the Bible and the
Koran? Yet this is hardly an argument for the repeal of the First Amendment.

The idea that something ought to be criminalized because it isn't
"harmless" is a key feature of the authoritarian mind-set. It's an idea
that allows for the criminalization of just about any imaginable activity,
since almost nothing in this world is harmless. Marijuana isn't harmless,
but it isn't nearly as harmful as, for example, alcohol -- a substance that
causes thousands of fatal overdoses every year (no one has ever died from
an overdose of marijuana).

So why don't we make America an alcohol-free nation by criminalizing
alcohol? The superficial answer is that we tried that once and it was total
failure. (Attempting to eliminate marijuana use has also been a total
failure: Almost half the current adult population -- nearly 100 million
Americans -- has used marijuana, and several million Americans continue to
use it regularly.) The more nuanced answer is that making America an
alcohol-free nation would actually be a bad thing, even if it were possible.

This isn't merely because the costs of prohibition are so high.

Most people who drink alcohol have benefited from the experience more than
they've been harmed by it. What anti-drug zealots are incapable of
acknowledging is that the same holds true for marijuana users.

Indeed the evidence is overwhelming that, for the vast majority of
marijuana users, their use has had no significant harmful effects, and many
good ones.

Yet as Grinspoon pointed out a quarter-century ago, "Reason has had little
influence in this matter." The criminal prohibition of marijuana, he said,
was due to "cultural factors that have nothing to do with the effect of the
drug itself."

In the years since little has changed, as we waste billions of dollars, and
give free rein to an increasingly dangerous authoritarianism, in the futile
attempt to stamp out this largely benign practice.