I’ve wanted to respond to Robert Nelson’s ludicrous column on the pot legalization petition ever since I read it on Wednesday. I don't normally have a problem with Robert Nelson, he's a perfectly fine columnist, but his take on the petition drive displayed a lot of what is wrong with the marijuana prohibition crowd. I'm just going to dig right in and cover the issues that I had with this column. The first thing that irked me about his article was his dismissal of the petition drive so early in the process. I know he was forcing this idea so he could use it as a framework to make some lame jokes about how potheads are unmotivated slackers, but still, only a few days into a petition drive that has nearly a year to gather signatures, it’s a little early to write the whole thing off. In fact, while Nelson couldn’t seem to find a petition anywhere he looked, I attended the concert and fireworks celebration at Memorial Park on July 1st, and lo and behold, a young man was walking around with one of the pot petitions gathering signatures left and right, so they are out there. (Needless to say my co-blogger and I took advantage of this opportunity to sign our names to the petition.
Nelson goes on to make the comparison between alcohol and pot which can hardly be avoided when discussing marijuana prohibition. To me the fact that alcohol is legal while pot is not shows how egregiously hypocritical our government can be. Strangely, Nelson seems to cede the point that alcohol is, in his own words, “more damaging than pot,” but because stoners can be “dangerously stupid” while high, it still makes sense to him that pot be illegal while alcohol is not. I really can’t follow his logic here. Certainly people who are drunk are just as susceptible to making dumb decisions as people who are high, so his argument falls flat to me. In this paragraph he also mentions that an 18-year-old would be able to grow weed in his backyard, but while I’m not sure, if this bill is modeled after California’s Prop 19, that bill treated pot like alcohol in that citizens would have to be 21 or over to use pot so I believe he may be misinformed on that point.
Speaking of our youth and the differences between alcohol and pot, I want to digress for a moment here and highlight one very meaningful difference, which is that a person cannot overdose on weed. I know some of my friends and I flirted with a dangerous line on many occasions while consuming alcohol and were very fortunate not to end up with alcohol poisoning. Anyone with any common sense would much prefer that our youth smoke pot than drink alcohol for that reason alone, and while pot is easy to come by, alcohol is relatively easier for our youth to obtain owing to its legal standing, at least according to my experience. If pot were legal than the playing field would level out, meaning more youth would likely use pot over alcohol, and therefore I would have to believe that incidents of alcohol poisoning would decrease.
Back to Nelson’s article, he indicates that he believes this amendment “is a bad idea on several fronts” but tellingly, he mostly avoids letting the reader know of these many reasons. This was a smart move by Nelson, really, if you’re on the wrong side of an issue the best argument is no argument at all. He knows he can’t be attacked for a point he doesn’t make. I think Nelson is like many people, he just doesn’t feel in his gut that marijuana should be legal. This feeling is void of all logic, but sadly many people vote according to these feelings. Interestingly, at the end of his column, Nelson agrees that “too many people are sent to prison on relatively minor drug offenses” and mentions that his “head is spinning” while trying to reconcile this with his stance on the issue, and the great thing about this is you can actually witness the cognitive dissonance kicking in. That tends to occur when you base a position on feelings instead of logic. He can tell himself he is against pot legalization for good reasons, but when logic just doesn’t back up a belief, cognitive dissonance inevitably sets in.
To end this post, let me quickly sum up why marijuana prohibition is actually the “bad idea on several fronts.” It is, as noted above, less harmful than alcohol and yet alcohol is perfectly legal. The prohibition of it shifts the profits from the sell of this drug from corporations, who can be taxed and regulated, to drug cartels that use violence to take out competitors and increase profits. Marijuana laws lead to otherwise perfectly decent people receiving drug convictions that can ruin their lives and even send them to jail. Prohibition costs us billions of dollars and, more importantly than all of the reasons above, IT SIMPLY DOES NOT WORK. Marijuana is prohibited and yet it remains prevalent. Even if the drug prohibitionists were right about everything else, if the drug war does little to prevent the use of the drug, then why should we continue to waste precious taxpayer dollars enforcing these laws? It is time to end the failed policies banning marijuana in this country, and a constitutional amendment in Nebraska legalizing marijuana would be a step in that direction.
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