On the evening of Sept. 7, 2010, a crowd of at least 50 Brown students huddled in Wayland Arch, all raising their hands in unison. After an hour-long debate, they were answering the question posed by the Janus Forum, "Should marijuana be legalized?" The affirmative response was nearly unanimous.
The audience judged the arguments for prohibition as hopelessly untenable. If I did not know any better, I might recommend that the Janus Forum choose more controversial issues. But according to an October 2010 Gallup poll, Americans are split nearly 50-50 on the issue of marijuana legalization. So what gives? Why is there such a discrepancy between the opinions here versus those throughout the country as a whole?
My theory is simple. Brown students are more politically motivated by rational debate than blind fear, hence they are particularly able at understand the fundamental irrationality of the war on marijuana. You can test my hypothesis for yourself.
In the past decade, over seven million Americans were arrested for nothing more than simple possession of marijuana, and hundreds of thousands of college students were denied federal financial aid because of marijuana arrests. In the past decade, the American government spent $150 billion fighting the War on Drugs, alongside the $250 billion spent by state governments. Americans spent an untaxed $360 billion out of their own pockets in the last 10 years to buy marijuana from illegal sources, generating profits for criminal gangs and violent cartels.
And all of this for what? Because, in the past decade, illicit drug use rates have not significantly changed — 81 to 90 percent of high school seniors said in 2009 it was easy to obtain marijuana. Drug cartels that are estimated to make anywhere from 15 to 60 percent of their profits from marijuana have become powerful enough to threaten the national sovereignty of our Latin American neighbors.
Somehow, the prohibitionists want to convince us that all of these costs are outweighed and justified by the risk of increasing usage rates if marijuana were legalized. This is generally the locus of controversy, but let us recognize the two distinct issues conflated in this anti-legalization tactic. The first premise asserted here is that prohibition policies actually achieve lower usage rates than legal regulation. Empirical evidence casts serious doubt on this claim.
First, the Netherlands — where cannabis has been practically legal for 30 years — has maintained a marijuana lifetime-usage rate of 22 percent among adolescents and adults, nearly half that of the United States, which has a usage rate of 41 percent. In fact, one Dutch official is quoted as saying, "We succeeded in making pot boring."
Secondly, the continued decline in tobacco use among Americans is proof that sensible regulations, coupled with honest and empirically based public education, can be effective in lowering and preventing the use of substances. So will more people use marijuana if it is legalized? It is hard to say, since usage rates do not seem to have much to do with whether the drug is legal or illegal.
The second even more dubious premise is that using marijuana is morally wrong and socially destructive, thus worth the inherent costs of prohibition. Let us be clear — driving under the influence of anything is dangerous, and individuals must be held accountable for their actions. But by what authority does the government of a so-called liberal democracy have the right to punish citizens for using a relatively benign psychoactive drug, when its use creates little harm to the citizens themselves and no harm to others?
Let's be honest — the real reason there is such staunch opposition to the legalization of marijuana is not because it is a danger to society, but because it is perceived as a threat to the dominant discourse of power. Marijuana is a mild psychedelic — a drug that expands one's consciousness — that has been repeatedly associated with the counterculture movement, alternative lifestyles and creativity. Hence, marijuana is associated with deviance.
This association is used as a pretext for the government's fear-mongering television commercials and politicians' "tough on crime" campaigns — attempts to justify the mass incarceration of non-violent marijuana users. But even more disturbing is the fact that the war on marijuana disproportionately harms minority communities. According to a 2010 study, researchers found blacks were two to four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites in California's 25 largest counties. And after the initial arrest, things get much bleaker. In Rhode Island, for example, a black person arrested for marijuana is eight times more likely to serve prison time than his white counterpart.
As much as you might dislike marijuana itself, the prohibition of marijuana is another thing entirely. The question you should ask yourself today, as you look out across the Main Green at 4:20 p.m. is, "Do I really feel threatened by these people?"
Jared Moffat '13 supports H5591, H5031 and S270 and can be contacted at jared_moffat@brown.edu.
