OPINION:
Americans are hardly suffering a shortage of ways to get high, but many of them are always on the scout for finding something else to crave. That’s the message Election Day sent with approval of expanded legal access to marijuana. You can’t legislate virtue, as the wise man said, but enshrining vice in the legal code is an easy way to pass a joint.
Recreational use of marijuana was approved last week in California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine; a similar hoot was snuffed in Arizona, at least for now. California’s Proposition 64 was adopted by 56 percent to 44 percent, enabling potheads on the West Coast to light up for fun from the Canadian border all the way to Mexico, Washington and Oregon having adopted similar measures earlier, joining Colorado, Alaska and the District of Columbia.
Voters in Florida, Arkansas, Montana and North Dakota decided to add cannabis to the medicine cabinet as a remedy for whatever ails them. This is how California stepped out onto the slippery slope, and soon everybody in California could get a “prescription.” Now potheads in the heart of the republic can join them.
Arizona, which approved medical marijuana in 2010, held the line against recreational use, with 52 percent voting no. Colorado’s experiment with pot for kicks could have been a factor. Hospital emergency room visits in Colorado involving cannabis doubled between 2013, the first year of legal use, and 2014. Not everyone who gets stoned gets a good time.
As pot use has climbed with the proliferation of legalization, drug-overdose deaths have set records, climbing to 47,000 nationwide in 2014. The body count in bucolic New Hampshire and Vermont is challenging the puffbombs of inner cities like New York and Los Angeles. Proponents nevertheless insist that pot is not a gateway drug that leads to the heavy stuff like heroin. But the simultaneous expansion of puffing and drug deaths is not a coincidence. Neither is the fact that the organization dedicated to acculturating Americans to pot — National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws — goes by the misleading acronym NORML.
During the 1980s, Nancy Reagan was lauded for exhorting America’s youth to resist the tide of drug use with her “Just say no” campaign. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, now the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, made great strides with its “This is your brain on drugs” TV commercial. How quaint it all seems now, when folks take a much more nuanced approach to the use of recreational drugs. The irony of the moment is that the other smokable weed, tobacco, is demonized for its health-wrecking properties while pot is treated like a medical miracle. Light up a cigarette in the states of enlightenment and watch nearby faces frown. Light up a joint and join the cool crowd. Perhaps Camel and Philip Morris should add a little marijuana to their recipe and they could be cool, too.
President-elect Donald Trump is opposed to recreational cannabis, but he has said each state should free to set its own policy. He supports medical marijuana.
Duplicitous is an apt description of Americans who urge their children to reach for the stars while they check the “yes” box for recreational pot. An unhealthy obsession with living the high life sets an example for the next generation that encourages personal pleasure over individual achievement. Our grandparents called it reefer madness.
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