The things we legalize
On Friday, the 1st of April—and presumably the date was a coincidence—the U.S. House of Representatives voted, with almost all Democrats supporting and almost all Republicans opposing, to approve the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, a bill that if it becomes law would remove marijuana as a federally controlled substance, set up a tax on future sales—because, Congress—and clear the record of people who have been convicted of non-violent crimes related to the drug. The Senate is unlikely to follow the House’s lead, repeating a similar quiet rejection in 2020.
Does it need to be said at this point that the war on drugs—no, that should be the War on Drugs, since it is a decades-long conflict that Congress has more or less declared, aided by the instigation of several presidents and their own motives—has been a comprehensive failure? The oft quoted financial cost is claimed to be more than a trillion dollars, which would make it one of our cheaper recent conflicts, though with one in five current prisoners being locked up for drug crimes—that would be some 240,000 as of 2020—and with who knows how many lives ruined or ended, with the war funding and driving violent crime, with racial disparities in enforcement, with the continued ease with which drugs can be obtained, and with the general disrespect for the law that all of this generates, it should be obvious that we lost a long time ago. To keep fighting, as many Republicans seem desirous of doing, would be to engage in a desperate guerrilla action that jungle warlords love well after any chance for victory is gone.
And we have been here before with our disastrous experiment in trying to ban the recreational use of alcohol. The restriction on marijuana use or possession got going with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937—conforming to the model of the National Firearms Act’s burdens placed on machine guns, suppressors, and the like—not by banning anyone from having or enjoying said herb, but by requiring one to render unto the federal government a tax for the privilege of being law-abiding. And things went very much worse from there.
As I wrote before in an article on Prohibition, “the history of the United States from the early colonization to the present shows two desires in the American character—namely, the desire to do whatever I damn well please combined with the desire to damn anyone who does what displeases me.” We have long had it in our cultural character to yearn to make sure that others are not doing what we would not do. And our efforts at imposing controls have fallen flat again and again, be the particular undesirable marijuana, beer, rock music, or guns. The harm of enforcement that results is always greater than the speculated harm of the naughty act. If, for example, white women want to drink beer and smoke pot with black gun owners—yes, these are a sample of the kinds of fears offered by advocates of control—is this really so bad? Does any good come from locking up hundreds of thousands of Americans, from creating a black market, or from making breaking at least some laws a socially acceptable and even laudable behavior?
It is worth noting that Al Capone is not infamous for his selling of pretzels. The law against the sale of alcohol for consumption created a business opportunity for that gangster and his fellow criminals to make piles of money providing ordinary folks a product in high demand. When the American people want something, we will get it, and given our revolutionary history, the government is well advised to get out of the way, as we will continue to get it no matter how many tax dollars and years in prison are wasted in the process. But to tie all of this into the theme of this magazine, gun control advocates especially should consider what would happen in a country whose population by a large percentage clearly wants to own and carry whatever firearms we like. Our attempts to stop the acquisition of alcohol and other psychoactive substances only drove crime, violent or otherwise, while making amelioration of the consequences of use more difficult. Addicts end up locked up all too often, be that for property crimes to afford the habit or attacks on people who are seen as being in their way. Gangs see the promise of large profits by transporting and selling the illegal good, and when they are not incarcerated for those criminal activities, they are killing each other to drive out the competition and killing bystanders in the process. Those who support gun control should also ask themselves how their attempts to burden and increasingly ban the possession of firearms drain away support from the kinds of programs that do in fact reduce violence, their supposed goal. I have seen in discussion after discussion a willingness on the part of gun owners to give expanded education, universal healthcare, a racial justice a try, only to object that these are Democratic policy goals (not really, but that is the perception), the goals of the party that supports gun control. And there goes a good chance to build support for the progressive platform.
I have no personal use for marijuana. Lagavulin and The Sixth Glass Quadruple Ale are good enough for me, though an equivalently relaxing quantity of pot might be cheaper. But as a supporter of rights and a supporter of good sense in laws, something that I would very much like to see tried some day, I applaud the House vote. I do not expect it to accomplish much. What I call for in the case of marijuana, of guns, and of so many things whose use for good or ill is up to the user is that we drop the struggle to control and instead promote the expectation of responsibility, along with the tools and opportunities for people to meet that standard.