Sarah Palin Says Yes to Pot; I Take Agent J’s Side

Sarah Palin’s just an endless fount of surprises, isn’t she? Dig what she said this week on Fox News courtesy of Michael van der Galien.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin – one of the most influential conservative women of our time – said during a recent appearance on Fox News that she doesn’t have a problem with people smoking marijuana in their own homes. “If somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm,” she explained, they should be left alone.

Huh. Some meany-face, super-religious conservative she is! It almost makes you wonder what other caricature-breaking ideas are running around in her head.

Michael thinks her statement is perfectly fine and so do I. The War on Drugs has become a debacle, mostly for the same reasons other wars turn disastrous: lack of sure leadership, lack of mission, and lack of clear objectives that lead toward a certain victory condition. However, that doesn’t mean that we should legalize marijuana or relax our drug laws across the board. I disagree with Michael here:

Palin’s only caveat to legalizing marijuana altogether, by the way, is that she fears it sends the wrong message to children. Although I understand her concern, I have to disagree. Legalizing something doesn’t mean it’s perfectly fine to do it, nor that it’s moral and wise. Moral values and wisdom shouldn’t be legislated.

If legalized, it’s up to parents to teach their children that although smoking weed is legal, it’s best not do it nonetheless. This is the responsibility of America’s fathers and mothers, not the government – who isn’t your daddy, after all.

The problem with this is that laws are a direct expression of moral values. We make certain activities illegal because they violate some precept of our moral code. Robbery is illegal because we believe, morally, that you should not deprive someone of their own property by coercion. Rape is illegal because we believe, morally, that you should be secure in your person. All our laws come, in some form or fashion, from a moral decision and we do have a duty as a society to build a moral framework for how we conduct ourselves with others and what sort of society we pass to the next generation upon which all of us, more or less, agree.

However, not every law is equal. There are a number of laws that we enforce less vigorously than others, for various reasons. Let’s take speeding as an example. There isn’t a county in America that doesn’t have a speed limit, yet all of us routinely violate those speed limits without penalty. Despite that, we haven’t launched a “War on Speeding” to squash the profligate violations of our laws. We don’t demand more police officers prowl the roadways with a zero tolerance policy toward anyone going one mile-an-hour over the limit. In fact, most of us know the unwritten rule that most police officers won’t hassle you if you’re going less than ten miles-an-hour faster than the limit. So, breaking the law is built into our calculations and, indeed, most of us would get ticked off if we got jammed for going 56 in a 55 zone. Why does this situation exist?

Well, we’ve realized that different people have different driving abilities. The speed limit (at least the ones set by the states. The Federal speed limit is a different animal entirely, thank you very much Jimmy Carter) is, essentially, a set of broadly agreed-upon judgments both moral and practical. We want to get to where we’re going in a reasonably orderly fashion. We don’t want people splattered all over the highway because someone drove faster than their ability could handle. We don’t want to have to guess whether our drive to work will be Death Race 2000 or Creep of the Elderly Pokealongs. Most of all, we want the authorities to be able to enforce our desires (some of which are moral and some no more than matters of good public order and personal convenience). But we also realize that abilities differ. Some people can drive more at higher speeds than others and our enforcement of the law takes that into account. But we still keep the law in place in case something happens, so we have a way of punishing the person at fault.

Our marijuana laws ought to work in the same fashion. We all know that people handle their highs differently. Some folks toke up at home or at a friend’s house and that they don’t go out impaired. Some do not and cause hazards for the rest of us. We know that marijuana smoke is harmful in the short and long term — the only real question is how harmful it is and whether that harm is permanent or temporary. We know that it’s in our best interest as a society if we keep the number of marijuana smokers to a responsible minimum, just as we don’t want everyone to get the idea they can drive as fast as they desire. So we have laws to send the message that we as a society do not condone the use of marijuana. That doesn’t mean we have to kick down doors, though.

I prefer a policy of benign indifference which is best expressed by Will Smith in Men in Black: “Don’t start nothin’; won’t be nothin’”. In other words, if you keep your weed-smoking out of the public eye, we’ll pretend it doesn’t exist at all. Society gets to keep the valuable the prohibition message and ensures that drug use isn’t widespread and public while pot-smokers get to toke up and teach their children lessons about compromise and reasonable dissent. We’ve done this with other things and it’s managed to work, so why not try it with marijuana?

UPDATE: Linked by Cubachi, an interesting up-and-coming blogger!

UPDATE 2: Moe Lane sees where I’m going on this, but prefers a treatment more similar to how we treat alcohol.

Other Posts of Interest:

• The Reason We Don’t Get Stoners to Write Laws
• Finally, Something the President Doesn’t Want to Tax

Tags: Marijuana Legalization

Category: The Social Issues