David Brooks inadvertently argues for legal marijuana

Guest post by Ted Leibowitz

(Ed. note: To listen to some great music, check out Ted's BAGeL Radio. For my take on David Brooks's remarkably stupid column on marijuana, see here. -- MJWS)

Okay, so if you haven't yet, you really must read David Brooks recent op-ed in the New York Times, "Weed: Been There. Done That." decrying marijuana legalization. While reading, please replace the words "weed" and "pot" with "alcohol," and the words "high" and "stoned" with "drunk," and you'll get a sense of what a total douchebag Brooks is. Then read the rebuttal, "I Smoked Pot With David Brooks," written and published by an old friend of Brooks' referenced in the op-ed. It is genius, I tell you. GENIUS. Besides exposing Brooks as a self-righteous gasbag, it lays out just how weak and nonsensical the arguments against marijuana legalization really are.

Bad news that looks like good news: Possible changes to New York's marijuana laws

Guest post by Ted Leibowitz  

Ed. note: Ted is good friends with our former associate editor and co-blogger Creature, and Ted often wrote for Creature's now-on-long-hiatus blog State of the Day. He's an occasional guest blogger here at The Reaction. -- MJWS  

Ted Leibowitz is an award-winning internet radio music director / DJ focused on bringing the best new and interesting indie rock to his worldwide listenership via his 10-year old station BAGeL Radio. He has been featured on panels at music/tech conferences and writes about the exciting new business of music as well as the foot-dragging, entrenched, dinosaur-like old music industry. 

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The headline reads, "New York State Is Set to Loosen Marijuana Laws." To marijuana advocates, this sounds good on the surface. However, Governor Andrew Cuomo's gesture is being made more for political reasons than for the betterment of New Yorkers. 

This is not good news for legal marijuana advocates and should be opposed and worked around. As with what Governor Chris Christie did in NJ, or the mistakes made in Connecticut (legal since May 2012; however, the state still has no dispensaries!), a baby step like this will do more to delay medical marijuana for most people and legalization in general than doing nothing. 

Making medical marijuana legal for a very limited number of people doesn't help the hundreds of thousands in jail for possession, nor the hundreds of thousands more who will be incarcerated in the coming years due to way-out-of-line draconian New York State and federal drug laws. 

The continued destruction of lives by criminalization and incarceration for a benign activity partaken of by so many is a social injustice equal to denying sick people medicine that will improve their quality of life. 

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Pardon me, but David Brooks should stick a bong up his ass

By Michael J.W. Stickings

One of the best responses to David Brooks's remarkably stupid column against marijuana legalization comes from The Nation's Michelle Goldberg, who writes this:

Brooks's lament about marijuana legalization is astonishing in its blindness to ruined lives and the human stakes of a serious policy debate. Somehow, he's written a whole column about the drug war that doesn't once contain the words "arrest" or "prison." It's evidence not just of his own writerly weakness but of the way double standards in the war on drugs shield elites from reckoning with its consequences.

And the obvious problem, except to lazy pontificators like Brooks, is that the "war on drugs" highly disproportionately targets non-whites. Rich white guys, or even just most white guys, smoke pot and get away with it. Not so much, say, blacks. And so Brooks's argument that marijuana should remain illegal because it doesn't promote "temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship" is self-absorbed bullshit. It's the sort of bullshit I used to hear a lot of when I was a Straussian graduate student, when the cult of the ancients prevailed and we would distinguish ourselves from the nihilistic postmodern world around us by aspiring, at least in speech, to what we pretentiously thought of as higher form of citizenship, the sort of which Socrates might approve. (Actually, I thought this was bullshit back then as well, a simplistic perversion of Strauss's teachings, and I recoiled from it.) But I digress...

It's not that I object to "temperate, prudent, self-government citizenship." Liberal democracies require it to some degree, and it's when citizenship is perverted, when, say, we become consumers instead of citizens, that our democratic rights wither and we basically lose the capacity for self-government and indeed of enlightenment generally.

But it's ridiculous to connect this to marijuana use, unless of course Brooks wishes to ban alcohol as well, which is also ridiculous. Our concept of citizenship allows for a great deal of individual choice and freedom, and people in a free society should be allowed to do things that do not harm others and indeed in a free society the burden is on the government, the government of the people, to show that something is harmful and so should not be permitted. Driving 100 mph through a residential area or physically assaulting someone qualifies as something harmful or so potentially harmful that it is in society's interests to try to prevent it. Smoking pot doesn't. Not even close. You can smoke pot and be anything but a threat to others. You can also smoke pot and be a good citizen. But even if you smoke pot and don't vote, which I hardly recommend, so what? It's a free fucking country. No?

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Everybody must get stoned

By Mustang Bobby

A majority of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana.

For the first time, more than half of Americans think that marijuana usage should be made legal, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans now back legalizing marijuana. That represents an 8-point increase from the previous record of 50 percent in 2011, and a 10-point increase from November 2012, just after Colorado and Washington voted for legalization.

“With Americans’ support for legalization quadrupling since 1969, and localities on the East Coast such as Portland, Maine, considering a symbolic referendum to legalize marijuana, it is clear that interest in this drug and these issues will remain elevated in the foreseeable future,” wrote Art Swift, Gallup’s managing editor.

Stock up on Pop-Tarts and Pringles now and avoid the rush. Or feel it. Whatever, dude.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)