I've been surprised by the controversy stirred by the NYT editorial board's official endorsement of American liberty. Sunday's "Repeal Prohibition, Again," in which the Grey Lady declared that "the federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana," is one of those evidently derring-do opinion pieces which strikes me as bold only after the controversy erupts. I have since seen the Times' opinion page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, in two cable interviews, defending his board's call for radical moderation, and on Sunday I thrilled to David Brooks' belting out of "Ya Got Trouble"--in River City--on "Meet the Press." Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former Drug Tsar, has had to be sedated.
I understand none of it--neither the need for defense nor all the hand-wringing. Or perhaps I should say sure I understand it, but I still don't get it. It's controversial for Establishment Journalism to embrace American freedom and denounce an authoritarian tyranny that has ruined thousands of lives for tens of years? Reefer madness is somehow more egregious, more grotesque, than despotic insanity?
My libertarian opinion is nothing personal. I don't smoke pot. The few times I tried it I only found myself unpleasantly hammered, groping for the edge of any stationary object, and waiting for the disagreeable fog to lift. Four, maybe five attempts (I'm a bit slow) at participatory delight were, for me, enough. My opinion is, rather, philosophical. I find the prospect of a bunch of congressional Billy Sundays legislating what I can put in my body offensive, repellent, and frankly unAmerican. If my pursuit of happiness entails deadening my brain on the wings of tetrahydrocannabinol for a few hours, well, the righteously sober should just have to learn to live with it. I'm not too crazy about some of their behavior, either--namely, their allegiance to obscurantism, but I don't advocate the criminalization of ignorance.
Speaking of national crimes, it's a common misconception that our first Prohibition caused an explosion of boozing. It did not. America's alcohol consumption did in fact decline in the 1920s. The one explosion it did cause was that of organized crime, which of course our second Prohibition has caused as well. Hence the cost of enforcing unmedicated American virtue has---twice--been that of reckless authoritarianism and rampant thuggery.
The drug war has been a comprehensive failure. I'm somewhat confident that the decriminalization of all substances will someday come about, with the humane, civilized treatment of their abuse taking brutish criminalization's place. And yet after all these decades of noted failure, the NYT editorial board makes a controversial splash over mere marijuana? I don't get it.