Pubdate: Wed, 12 Mar 2014
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2014 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Eric Rozenman
Note: Eric Rozenman is a Washington, D.C.-based news media analyst. 
The opinions expressed above are solely his own.

MARIJUANA SUPPORTERS MISREAD HISTORY

Support for decriminalizing recreational marijuana use and increasing 
its medicinal availability spreads like an oil spill. Colorado and 
Washington's decriminalization, coupled with President Barack Obama 
musing that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol - though he 
hopes his children will avoid the former as a bad habit - accelerate 
the change.

Supporters seek to end so-called victimless crimes and regulate a 
popular activity wrongly stigmatized. Revenue hungry states like 
Maryland, with Senate Bill 658, consider joining them.

But the movement misreads American history. It took roughly 125 years 
for the United States to get its drinking problem under control. 
Temperance movements swept the country in the mid- and late-1800s 
after alcohol consumption peaked at 7 gallons per capita annually. 
And that was mostly whiskey and rum, not beer and wine.

The movement over-reached with prohibition via the 18th Amendment, 
1919 to 1933, but temperance achieved lasting successes little 
recognized today: Per capita liquor consumption, the ratio of taverns 
to population, and instances of public intoxication all plunged.

Historian Norman H. Clark concluded his study of temperance, 
prohibition and repeal, "Deliver Us from Evil," by noting that 
researchers believe people drink to excess to relieve tension. 
Tension aplenty, from the dislocations of industrialization, Civil 
War, urbanization and massive immigration meant that "intemperance in 
the United States, and the Prohibition Movement which followed it, 
were carried around by the virus of social disorder."

Expect more social disorder if a country that took a century and a 
quarter to learn to handle its liquor legalizes marijuana. Being 
stoned is a condition that loosens civic bonds, so tolerating if not 
encouraging use should contribute to, not lessen, what Clark 
described as an "attenuated sense of community."

Germany's legalization of prostitution a decade ago, another project 
to decriminalize an age-old social ill, led to unexpected 
consequences including international sex tourism and increased human 
trafficking. There seems to be little apprehension that legalizing 
pot could go awry in its own way.

Two years ago a large New Zealand study reportedly found regular 
marijuana use - today's hybrid weed is many times stronger than that 
of past decades - associated with broad neurological declines in 
children and adults. Stuart Gitlow, an addictive disease specialist 
at New York City's Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, says flatly "there's 
no benefit to marijuana. ... We're with marijuana right now where we 
were with tobacco back in the 1910s and 1920s."

But the federal government, which has spent billions of dollars 
informing citizens of the dangers of tobacco and whose statutes still 
outlaw weed, lets states give a wink and nod to toking up.

Perhaps an attenuated sense of community does not trouble pot 
legalizers. In one area only do U.S. progressives proclaim liberty: 
psycho-sexual. Only here is "choice" the battle-cry. It is heard 
regarding abortion on demand, same-sex marriage and now recreational drug use.

Maybe a nation whose Judeo-Christian roots in self-reliance and 
self-restraint yield to a pseudo-Freudian "if it feels good, do it" 
mentality requires additional painkillers. Especially a country with 
record public and private debt, record numbers on food stamps and low 
and declining rates of labor force participation. If booze isn't 
sufficient to tranquilize us, then perhaps Aldous Huxley's "Brave New 
World," published in 1932, was on target and recreational marijuana 
becomes another ingredient in the "soma" gum of today's brave new world.

But if choice in drugs is to be really meaningful, then why not a 
buffet with booze and pot just two intoxicants among many? Let us 
also bring Oxycontin, meth, cocaine, heroin and the rest out from the 
shadows and under the bureaucrat and tax man. Life, liberty and the 
pursuit of self-medication.

But the nation's parents, including President Obama, should use 
caution when speaking to our children: Worse than substituting 
marijuana for alcohol or tobacco is the habit of mistaking license for liberty.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom