Issue 3.5: Weed Will Make You Angry, and Demand Facts

That Puritanism conforms to the standards of social advantage set up by Puritans shouldn't come as a shock, nor should it be any argument in its favor. If you're suggesting that there is a “verifiable, socially advantageous manner” of behavior, that is the essence of Puritanism, the conjoining of Anglo-Saxon social empiricism and moralistic standards. What you fail to account for is the apparatuses of the state enforcing the result you suggest is verifiable, therefore creating the realm in which their rules and antique morality can be considered successful.

To back up your assertion, two strains of state power are unleashed. The first is the obvious; criminalization, the capture, detention and torture of drug users and peddlers within a state operated or state condoned prison, in a way more violent than the worst drug war.

The second is the conjuring of mythical notions of drugs in the social consciousness by the state. The preponderance of harm or negative social affects that land on a drug user come out of fictions: that smoking weed makes you worse at your job, that smoking weed is a legal violation that singularly demonstrates an anti-social personality, that violence is inherent to the drug trade, etc. None of these are true, in the real sense, but they all manufacture the supposedly verifiable detriments you've “measured”.

Regarding your suggestion that Medical Marijuana de-emphasize it's organized character and become a pressingly true notion being ignored by politicians: while decriminalization has only recently gained a majority and a significant one at that; 55 to 43 you claim those numbers are shallow because they haven't effected legislation. Except that it has, explicitly in Massachusetts and less explicitly elsewhere:



Regarding Medical Marijuana, its “shallow” support has been the most effective means of Marijuana decriminalization. To suggest that the campaign has been other than wildly successful is absurd. Nearly as absurd, however, is to claim that political issues are ever dealt with by inertia, or that a public information or political campaign on an issue where you already have a majority of public opinion is a bad idea. The problem with this issue isn't the lack of movement, it's that the speed of that movement remains so out of proportion to the public support on the issue and that those opposing the shift in policy have for so long failed to come up with a coherent and ethically justifiable response.



Regarding your stereotyping, I'm going to propose two arguments. First, what makes marijuana use a more significant measure of deviance from social norms than any other criminal behavior? It seems like a pretty safe crime to me, relative to some other crimes like drinking in public or running a stop sign. It also seems more social, in that it often occurs in groups. It is, on the level of use, also not anti-social, not intentionally violating other people's rights like, say, not disposing of motor oil properly, or driving excessively or in excessively low-mileage vehicles. It's also not a violation of typically conservative structures like the heterosexual family unit, in the way that pre-marital sex, divorce and homosexuality are. And why aren't gay people, Divorcées, careless home mechanics, people who drink on their porch and asshole SUV drivers not more anti-social than marijuana users? What mystical trait does marijuana have, then, that would make it so perfect a marker of anti-social tendencies?

Second, I'm curious what verifiable evidence you have of this stereotype's existence? Maybe it's logically clear, to you, but what empirical data do you have that shows a significant correlation between marijuana use and anti-sociality? And if there is, is it causal? Does smoking weed make you more anti-social? And if it doesn't, then these pot-smoking sociopaths would sociopaths anyway, right, so marijuana as a marker of criminality only works on people who, by your definition, are interested in breaking laws because they're laws, anarchists of some kind, not because they enjoy any of the results of their criminal behavior. So many questions. Do you think this person exists? Has ever existed? Is a remotely plausible description of anyone you've ever met, much less the people you know who smoke weed? Would you describe a majority of them as “dysfunctional”? Couldn't we make something else, something with no valuable characteristics, be the slighty-illegal litmus test for their sociopathic tendencies? Where you work, do they have people who smoke weed? Do they fit into your claimed “deduction” that interest in civil processes are lessened by people who smoke weed?

Regarding your claim to drug dealer's necessary violence: So, drug dealers lack the ability to turn to the police to right wrongs, to prevent theft and robbery. Agreed. But so does everyone else. Do the cops give a shit if someone steals a couple hundred dollars of your stuff? Is, therefore, your only recourse to attack those people who have wronged you? Seeing as Minneapolis and St. Paul together haven't been able to scratch up a verifiable drug murder so far this year, we should probably suppose that there were no disagreements between drug dealers. Right? No, they have many recourses beyond violence. Different distributors, different partners, different parts of town, different drugs, there are a hundred responses to drug violence other than more drug violence. The “only response” seems absurd when you count the actual number of homicides related by the DOJ to the drug trade; 4.8% (in 1998, the last year I could find data, but pretty stable over the previous decade) or what would be around 730 murders related to the actual trade of drugs per year. Which is a phenomenally small number. The number of murders, on the other hand, committed by a domestic partner is hovering around double that.

Regarding Scalability, perhaps it isn't scalable. Remember, I'm concerned about a drug war in Juarez, over the cocaine and marijuana traffic. Cocaine use doesn't have any of the structural characteristics of marijuana use, nor does heroin. Alcohol does, though, and I'd argue it works admirably within that context. You said that I “had to pick marijuana because this would not work for any other drug”, where you also could have said that I “had to pick marijuana because that's the only one that would make any sense at all”. I'm not making a case for broader legalization of all drugs. I leave that to the libertarians who live on impossible principles and delight in getting nothing, though a pure nothing, done. So I have no reason to show you a socially responsible heroin user, just as I have no reason to show you a socially responsible soy-bean farmer or any other such thing unrelated to the issue at hand.

So, are you willing to continue to justify your claims about those crazy potheads and their ineffective social movement?