Robert Guest at I Was The State posts that marijuana arrests, according to FBI statistics have reached an all-time high (forgive the pun). This will not be a post about legalization of marijuana, so if that’s what you want to read, you can stop here.
George Bush toked some, as did Barak Obama and Newt Gingrich. It was illegal then, and it’s illegal now. The difference between these guys and 826,000 other people is that they weren’t arrested for it last year. Had they been arrested, it’s unlikely that they would be where they are now.
We need to separate the fact that marijuana is a despised drug, noting that it is perceived as being so heinous that even medical use had been met with rejection, with the stark reality that almost everyone alive today under 60 and over 16 years of age has tried it. If we are to exclude people from running for office, or holding a job, or enjoying the multitude of opportunities that our nation has to offer, because they have smoked marijuana, we’re going to have very few people left.
Consider, for a second, who in the relevant age group hasn’t given marijuana a test drive. My sense is that these are people so far out of the mainstream of society that they couldn’t possibly relate to the regular people. No doubt there will be some (many?) to dispute this, and tell how they have never touched the stuff and how they are indeed mainstream and proud of it. But the claim is only as good as the source, and anyone who has managed to live their life without any whiff of marijuana is unlikely to see themselves as others would.
America is viewed by Europeans as being an immature society, full of repression and child-like notions of morality. America, on the other hand, views the Europeans as jaded and declining from moral decay. But they have a point when it comes to our expectations of the purity of public figures and role models. Much of America demands that our politicians be better than they are, be the person they wish they could be but never will.
We attribute a moral virtue to ourselves that is undeserved under the theory that if we did something bad and no one knows about it, it never happened. We let our mind play a convenient trick, washing away our sins so that we can hold ourselves out as paragons to others. As somebody once said, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Point well taken.
Should the winner and the loser in the game of life be determined by the very good fortune of not getting caught? Should judges who sit on high pass judgment on those who have done no different than they themselves did when surrounded by friends who could keep a secret? We need to come to grips with this moral hypocrisy. As we learn daily, our ever-increasing malum prohibitum obsession with order has brought the most upright into the same club as the most downlow. We now have a crime for everyone, and while many are well deserved, many more simply reflect life-style choices that are pervasive yet forbidden.
If we cannot get beyond our Puritan past to a point where we can do wrong and not be tainted forever, there will be few of us around who can lay honest claim to virtue, and those who can will then be tainted by their odd failure to have experienced the normal culture shared by the rest of America. We really need to grow up about this. With 826,0000 Americans were arrested for marijuana last year, we’re just taking too many people off the table for no good reason.
George Bush toked some, as did Barak Obama and Newt Gingrich. It was illegal then, and it’s illegal now. The difference between these guys and 826,000 other people is that they weren’t arrested for it last year. Had they been arrested, it’s unlikely that they would be where they are now.
We need to separate the fact that marijuana is a despised drug, noting that it is perceived as being so heinous that even medical use had been met with rejection, with the stark reality that almost everyone alive today under 60 and over 16 years of age has tried it. If we are to exclude people from running for office, or holding a job, or enjoying the multitude of opportunities that our nation has to offer, because they have smoked marijuana, we’re going to have very few people left.
Consider, for a second, who in the relevant age group hasn’t given marijuana a test drive. My sense is that these are people so far out of the mainstream of society that they couldn’t possibly relate to the regular people. No doubt there will be some (many?) to dispute this, and tell how they have never touched the stuff and how they are indeed mainstream and proud of it. But the claim is only as good as the source, and anyone who has managed to live their life without any whiff of marijuana is unlikely to see themselves as others would.
America is viewed by Europeans as being an immature society, full of repression and child-like notions of morality. America, on the other hand, views the Europeans as jaded and declining from moral decay. But they have a point when it comes to our expectations of the purity of public figures and role models. Much of America demands that our politicians be better than they are, be the person they wish they could be but never will.
We attribute a moral virtue to ourselves that is undeserved under the theory that if we did something bad and no one knows about it, it never happened. We let our mind play a convenient trick, washing away our sins so that we can hold ourselves out as paragons to others. As somebody once said, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Point well taken.
Should the winner and the loser in the game of life be determined by the very good fortune of not getting caught? Should judges who sit on high pass judgment on those who have done no different than they themselves did when surrounded by friends who could keep a secret? We need to come to grips with this moral hypocrisy. As we learn daily, our ever-increasing malum prohibitum obsession with order has brought the most upright into the same club as the most downlow. We now have a crime for everyone, and while many are well deserved, many more simply reflect life-style choices that are pervasive yet forbidden.
If we cannot get beyond our Puritan past to a point where we can do wrong and not be tainted forever, there will be few of us around who can lay honest claim to virtue, and those who can will then be tainted by their odd failure to have experienced the normal culture shared by the rest of America. We really need to grow up about this. With 826,0000 Americans were arrested for marijuana last year, we’re just taking too many people off the table for no good reason.
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While I understand this is not an avenue for legalizing Marijuana I just want to point out that during our current economic crisis we need tax revenue. Consider this figure and formula. You have 826,000 people who spend $20 every day. Your total outcome is $16,520,000 per year. Now this number is inaccurate because that is just how many people were arrested, not how many people used. Consider this: According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2006, 14.8 million Americans age 12 or older used marijuana at least once in the month prior to being surveyed… 14.8 million say they use it at least once a month. That ‘once a month’ is almost equal to the revenue possibly gained by converting arrests into profit.
You tell me which is worse for the economy; Doing nothing to gain a profitable amount of money from a popular underground substance, or spending hundreds of millions of dollars putting people in jail while real criminals go free?