Pubdate: Fri, 10 Jan 2014
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: David Sirota, Creators.com

COLORADO'S REEFER SANITY

Seven years before legal marijuana went on sale this month in my home 
state of Colorado, the drug warriors in President George W. Bush's 
administration released an advertisement that is now worth revisiting.

"I smoked weed and nobody died," intoned the teenage narrator. "I 
didn't get into a car accident. I didn't OD on heroin the next day. 
Nothing happened."

The television spot from the White House drug czar was intended to 
discourage marijuana use by depicting it as boring. But in the 
process, the government suggested that smoking a little pot is 
literally, in the words of the narrator, "the safest thing in the world."

Why is this spot worth revisiting? Because in light of what's 
happening here in Colorado, the ad looks less like a scary warning 
than a reassuringly accurate prophecy. Indeed, to paraphrase the ad, 
for all the sky-will-fall rhetoric about legalization, there haven't 
been piles of dead bodies and overdoses. Nothing like that has 
happened since we started regulating and taxing marijuana like alcohol.

Instead, as I saw during a trip to 3D Cannabis Center in Denver, it 
has been the opposite. There, I didn't find the mayhem predicted by 
so many drug warriors. I found an understated retail facility, a 
technologically advanced horticultural operation, respectful 
customers and a staff with expert knowledge. It was, in fact, similar 
to one of Colorado's much-ballyhooed craft beer companies. The only 
major difference was that, according to decades of medical and social 
science research, the mind-altering product being sold at the 
cannabis center is far safer than the alcohol being peddled at the breweries.

Of course, this portrait of tranquillity, normalcy and pragmatism is 
often downplayed by the sensationalist national media in faraway 
Washington, D.C. There, amid wild speculation about absurdly 
apocalyptic hypotheticals, the fist-shaking "get off my lawn!" fogies 
are negatively caricaturing legalization in a fit of reefer madness.

For instance, there's been tripe such as Ruth Marcus' Washington Post 
screed that at once warns of the supposed "perils of legalized pot" 
and absolves herself for previously using the drug. There was also 
the lament from the New York Times' David Brooks, in which he first 
fondly reminisced about his erstwhile pot smoking and then claimed 
that legalizing marijuana harms America's "moral ecology."

To these hypocrites, and others like them, it is apparently OK for 
media elites to have smoked weed as kids, but not OK for today's 
adults to do the same.

Worse, in casting legalization as a hazardous experiment, these 
sententious moralizers ignore how the failed and destructive 
experiment isn't legalization - it is prohibition. After all, despite 
prohibition, the federal government acknowledges that marijuana has 
been "almost universally available" through an unregulated 
underground market. Meanwhile, marijuana prohibition has become a 
weapon of bigotry. As criminal justice data prove, though whites and 
African Americans use the drug at almost the same rate, the latter 
are almost four times more likely to be arrested on marijuana charges.

To be sure, ending prohibition won't singularly eliminate the 
underground market or end racism in law enforcement. But it is a 
constructive step toward those goals.

This decision to embrace reefer sanity in Colorado, mind you, will 
not be free of rough spots. But as we are already proving, it is 
clearly the prudent way forward - no matter how much the drug 
warriors and professional alarmists try to pretend otherwise.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom