This will be the unpopular diary of the day on Daily Kos, but so be it. I will brace myself for the insults to come. (Just to cut you off at the pass, I am not a fat, golf-playing, plaid-pants-wearing, alcoholic, evangelical, Puritanical Republican. So there. Seriously, though, this ought to be an interesting test of civility on Daily Kos.)
I could support decriminalization of marijuana for personal use, which is the de facto policy throughout most of the United States right now, but I do not support outright legalization.
I am also skeptical of "medical marijuana," which in most of its implementations looks very much like a proxy for legalization. If someone grows a couple of plants in the closet and smokes a joint at home, I wouldn't send the police in after them. But I will continue to vote against legalization and its proxies.
Marijuana Is Much More Dangerous Than Advocates Want To Acknowledge
Marijuana users commonly portray their drug of choice as harmless, and they routinely dismiss any and all evidence to the contrary. In fact, marijuana is far more potent than it once was, making its effects similar to those of opiates. There are numerous credible studies linking regular marijuana use to serious mental health problems, including psychosis and schizophrenia, along with other impairments in learning, memory, attention, and motor skills. Marijuana stays in the system because THC is fat soluble. As a result, regular users of pot are always a little stoned.
Political Reality: Marijuana Lacks The Broad Constituency That Alcohol Enjoys.
Advocates for legalization continually portray pot as a drug with mass acceptance, but that's not so. Among adults over the age of 25, alcohol is 8 to 18 times more popular than marijuana. Among high school youth, alcohol has almost triple the popularity of pot.
Young people are more likely to smoke pot (and to use other drugs) than adults, but among adults over the age of 25, the rate of pot use is 8.6% (26-34 years old) and 3% (over 35 years old), compared to alcohol at 62.5% and 53.3%, respectively. The statistics are here (PDF file) -- see Table 66.
To marijuana users and advocates who might cite the different legal status of pot and alcohol, I would note that among 16- and 17-year-olds, for whom both alcohol and marijuana are illegal, alcohol use (30.3%) is nearly three times as prevalent marijuana use (13.6%). And I'd appreciate it if people wouldn't try to argue that this is because alcohol is more available to teens than pot is, because that's simply not true and anyone who's ever chatted with a teenager knows it.
The statistical evidence strongly suggests that the use of marijuana and other illegal drugs peak in the late high school and college years, and then go down when people grow up, enter the workforce, and realize that brainpower is their primary capital asset.
Cultural Reality Underlying Political Reality: Marijuana Does Not Have The Same Roots As Alcohol
The best way to tell this is to compare the prohibition of alcohol from 1919-1933 with the legal status of marijuana. Prohibition cut alcohol use sharply for a couple of years, but then it rebounded to somewhere between 60% of pre-Prohibition levels and 90% of pre-Prohibition levels.
If the use of marijuana, now legally banned, is in a similar state of restraint as alcohol use was during the later phases of Prohibition, then we could expect legalization to have a relatively minor impact on usage rates. Rather than being one-eighth to one-eighteenth as popular as alcohol among adults over 25 years of age, marijuana might become one-sixth to one-fifteenth as popular.
But then, maybe not. Would current marijuana users simply use more, or would there be an expansion in the number of users? It's impossible to know. In any case, all of this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it would bolster the pro-legalization argument: "What's the difference," advocates might say. "Use won't go up much." On the other hand, opponents might answer that there's no need to legalize this drug to satisfy a small subculture.
Alcohol Prohibition failed not because Americans decided that alcohol was a benign substance, but because its cultural roots overwhelmed attempts to ban it. Marijuana's users like to portray their drug of choice as being benign, which it isn't. They also like to portray it as popular, but it's not. Marijuana use exists on the fringes of society, not at the center. The data show it.
Why Add More Social Problems?
We have enough trouble with alcohol now. If marijuana is legalized, even a conservative model would suggest that usage will rise by somewhere between one-third and two-thirds. This would mean more traffic accidents, more cognitive problems among youth, and more mental illness. All of these things are predictable.
Ah, but wouldn't it also lead to fewer drug arrests and therefore savings on prison costs? I doubt it. While there are indeed people in prison for nothing more than marijuana use (something I oppose) the overwhelming majority of drug arrests are for trafficking, and not just of marijuana.
Is Legalization of Marijuana The Camel's Nose Under The Tent?
Given the potency of marijuana now distributed, the arguments for its legalization pave the way for a completely libertarian approach, i.e., the legalization of all drugs: meth, opiates, psychedelics, you name it. The damage wrought by the use of those substances is legion, and the failure of legalization experiments in Britain and Switzerland is well known, not to mention the Chinese experience with opium. Still, if we legalize pot I think we will see a demand for further liberalization, and I think that would be an unmitigated social disaster.
Yes, There Are Paradoxes. Get Used To It.
Human beings have an urge to become intoxicated. There isn't a single culture that doesn't consume mind-altering substances. However, I see no reason to think that this requires us to legalize any particular one of them. As with everything else, we pick and choose and then live with the consequences. We don't have to legalize pot if we don't want to.
An Anti-Legalization Argument I Do Not Accept: Prioritization
In a different thread about this subject, there were some arguments that Obama should make legalization a low-priority issue because there are bigger fish to fry. I have seen the same case made with respect to eliminating the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy with respect to gays in the military.
I reject the prioritization argument in both cases. If Obama wants to legalize pot, I see no reason to put it on the back burner, nor do I see any reason to put DADT repeal on the back burner. To me, the prioritization argument is dishonest. It's a way of pretending to support someone's point of view, but to say, "We have other things to do."
Well, we're not going to fix the economy. That one is, by definition, a neverending story. We're not going to bring world peace. Health care reform is going to take a long time; it probably won't be enacted until Obama's second term, if he gets one. I see no reason why, in the meantime, other issues can't be debated and decided. I am in favor of DADT repeal, and think it ought to go on the agenda right now. I am against the legalization of marijuana but am willing to consider decriminalization if it's done carefully, and I think that also ought to go on the agenda right now.
There Are Real Problems With Current Policies.
Even though I oppose legalization, I don't endorse every aspect of the so-called War on Drugs. I don't think personal use, possession, or cultivation (in very small amounts) of marijuana should be a crime. The occasional stories about this or that individual imprisoned for some impossibly long period of time because the police found a joint in his pocket outrage me as much as they outrage the advocates of legalization.
I'm an advocate of decriminalization and tolerance. But it has its limits. I'd relax the penalties in certain areas, but I might substantially increase them in a few cases. For example, (s)he who distributes any drug illegal for adults to a minor would, in my ideal world, be penalized to a degree that (s)he would sorely regret ever having made that mistake. Why? Because the evidence on marijuana is clear: This is not something we want our kids using. Period.