Sam Smith
After
listening to two friends debate the legalization of marijuana (the opponent,
incidentally, sipping some vodka as he did so), I was reminded again of
the degree to which we have become addicted to the law as a primary way to solve
life’s problems.
From
the multi-page documents we accept unread in order to get our new computer
software going to the soaring number of laws being passed at every government
level we have, without philosophical discussion or debate, let the law and its practitioners
gain unprecedented control over our lives.
You
don’t have to be a libertarian to be stunned by the fact, for example, that
about 40,000 state laws were passed in 2012.
This
is not a legal or political issue, it is a philosophical and cultural one. Why
have we let lawyers and the law intrude so deeply into areas that were once
taught, defined and promulgated by family,
church, community and education?
Consider
this from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project:
Around the country, school administrators, elected
officials, and prosecutors are tackling the truancy problem through the
criminal justice system, ratcheting up enforcement, slapping students and
parents with big-dollar fines, and threatening jail time. Atlanta, Georgia, and
Lynchburg, Virginia sharpened their truancy policies this year with the aim of
increasing prosecutions. In Detroit, Los Angeles, and Compton, the police sweep
the streets for truants and enforce daytime curfew laws.
… The absurdities of harsh truancy policies made
headlines in May when a Houston-area judge jailed Diane Tran, 17, for
missing too much school and fined her $100. News reports revealed that Tran was
an 11thgrade honor student working two jobs to support siblings
after her parents divorced and moved out of state. Tran’s treatment attracted
the public’s attention, but thousands of students and their parents are
regularly churned through similar courts without public scrutiny of the
process, its costs, or its effectiveness.
In
this instance, the victims are typically lower income and/or minority students,
a bias seen elsewhere in our system, including the enforcement of marijuana
laws.
But
beyond that problem is a more general one. Why do we turn over to the law so
easily matters that we once looked to parents, priests, teachers and social
workers to solve? How can you have a decent community or country if the major
influence towards doing the right thing has become the brutal remedies of the
judicial and police systems?
And would
you have been a better person if you had received jail time or fines for various
offenses you committed along the way?
It’s
a question we seldom discuss, argue about or examine in a rational way.
The
reason why marijuana laws are such a good case in point is because they simply
haven’t worked. And we didn’t even have to go through four decades of a failed
war on drugs to find that out. We had ample precedent in alcohol prohibition.
Obviously,
if you’re a parent, you don’t want your sub-teen smoking pot or your teenager
driving under its influence. But how can you arrive at a sensible approach to
this when the major solution presented is a legal one?
What
if we applied the same approach to doing homework or kids not putting food back
in the refrigerator?
Just
as with alcohol, you can have obvious points at which the law enters – such as
driving under the influence – but our current culture not only uses the law as
surrogate parents, teachers and community values, but does so even when it’s
patently clear that it’s not working.
Some
years back I suggested that a good urban planning principle would be to look
for things that normally honest people do that are illegal, such as the 40,000
illegal accessory apartments in Los Angeles at that time. Or that in my neighborhood
there was a business block where people normally double parked, but only right
in front of the store where they were picking up their cleaning or whatever and
only for a short while. The cops, I noticed, left this block alone.
Using
marijuana falls into a similar category. At least three of our most recent
presidents have used pot and/or even cocaine. Whatever their political faults,
drug use did not seem to be prominent among them.
We
have ruined far more lives criminalizing marijuana than have been hurt by using
it, but we were taught by increasingly bullying politicians, police and their
supporting media that this was the way to solve the problem.
It's
way past time not only to legalize marijuana but delegalize the way we approach
such issues.
