Smoke Detectors

Something strange is in the air.

Soothing and sweet, twitching the nostrils of the millions of Americans who at some time or another in their lives have blissfully inhaled, a cohort which numbers among its members (at least) two Presidents and excludes only the most steadfast unsophisticates, it wafts ominously through the bustling corridors of schools high and low, including our own E. C. Glass, blankets crowded courtrooms coast-to-coast like early-morning fog, shadows celebrities and sports heroes to their secluded residences and private parties, and incites whole countries to vicious gang wars, senseless violence, brutal killings, and widespread corruption.

I'm speaking, of course, of the pestilential plant, the wicked weed, the sinfully seductive substance known as marijuana.

Four tenth-grade girls are on their way to school one morning when one suggests that they detour to McDonald's, which, for those unfamiliar with Lynchburg geography, is about three blocks away. Instead of an ordinary Egg McMuffin or sausage biscuit, they purchase some pot -- in the parking lot, I presume, although not having frequented a McDonald's in ten years, I'm not sure what delicacies may be served up behind (or under) the counter these days.

An hour or so later, a teacher or administrator -- exhibiting some very talented and highly developed olfactory nerves -- detects the telltale aroma. A search reveals only one girl in actual possession -- according to an attorney friend consulted by another girl's parents -- but suspicion and proximity trump physical evidence and due process and earn all four the maximum penalty: a 365-day suspension -- never mind that only one girl confesses, two take the Fifth (Ammendment, that is), and the fourth vigorously professes her innocence.

That the latter boasts a straight-A report card, a sterling collection of track-and-field trophies, and an unblemished behavioral record is irrelevant; she is destined to spend a year rehabilitating herself at the Pride Center for delinquent youth -- unless a School Board Panel of Appeals, in a rare display of compassion and leniency, should decide to moderate her sentence.

She may have already been tested for drugs -- and passed -- in compliance with a peculiar and discriminatory school policy which subjects school athletes to random drug tests, but no other students. Apparently, smoking marijuana disqualifies one from playing football and basketball but not from participating in school plays, band concerts, or spelling bees.

For four years Amherst County High School student Peter Rose is "the perfect kid," to quote a local television station. He leads the school to two Group AA state football championships, throwing for 1133 yards, rushing for 1790, accounting for 40 total touchdowns, and winning state player-of-the-year honors his senior year. He carries a 3.0 grade-point average, his school's prom-king crown, and the Mr. Amherst County nameplate. A fabulous future awaits him as he prepares to attend Virginia Tech on a full scholarship and play defensive back.

That is, until the Amherst County Sheriff's Office -- determined to root out and punish all criminal elements in its jurisdiction -- launches an elaborate (and expensive?) undercover investigation into drug trafficking. A law enforcement officer posing as a student twice purchases a quarter-ounce of marijuana from Rose (and similar amounts from six other current and former students) and saddles him with two misdemeanor and two felony charges, the latter for selling marijuana within 1000 feet of a school. Within days -- the guilt of the accused a foregone conclusion -- Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer strips Rose of his scholarship, stating that it has always been contingent upon the recruit maintaining high standards of conduct in his community, in his school, and on the football field.

Why would a young man with the world at his feet test the treacherous waters of illicit entrepreneurship and risk it all? Why indeed -- except for the lure of some extra spending money, the same profit motive that drives this thriving billion-dollar international underground industry at every level of distribution. (A stand of 300 mature marijuana plants can produce $1,000,000 at wholesale. Marijuana sells on the street for anywhere between $50 and $200 an ounce, while a deadly ounce of tobacco retails for two dollars.)

At his sentencing hearing, Rose testifies that his family has always struggled financially (and while colleges like Virginia Tech will reap millions from the exploits of Rose and his teammates on the field, the players will continue to go uncompensated -- but that's fodder for another blog) and that he saw an opportunity to make some easy money by dealing drugs. A sympathetic judge reduces Rose's jail time to fifteen days and dismisses the felony charges, provided he completes one hundred hours of community service, undergoes a substance abuse assessment, and remains on good behavior. Rose has a chance to redeem himself and earn another college scholarship -- but not at Virginia Tech.

A friend of mine who is a local Commonwealth's Attorney derided the generous sentence, claiming that athletes are often shown favoritism. But I'm not so sure.

Consider the hysterical reaction to the photograph taken of Michael Phelps smoking a cannabis bong at a University of South Carolina house party -- which, while confirming that the fourteen-time Olympic gold medalist is indeed a pothead, appears to dispel the canard that marijuana is demotivating and performance-diminishing.

Finding such behavior "not consistent with the image of Kellogg," the 103-year-old cereal maker drops its sponsorship of Phelps. Although stopping short of termination, another sponsor, Subway, censures him. USA Swimming releases a public reprimand, withdraws financial support, and bans the swimmer from competition for three months. A politically-ambitious County Sheriff threatens an arrest, until he is bluntly reminded by the Public Defender's Office that in twenty-one years no one has ever been charged with drug possession based on photographic evidence and an admission of non-specific wrongdoing.

If there is a double standard in play here, it is not between athlete and non-athlete; it is between marijuana and alcohol. Four years ago, when Phelps was arrested for drunk driving, he was allowed to continue swimming and did not lose a single endorsement.

In the words of Orlando Sentinel sportswriter Mike Bianchi: "What's worse -- taking a bong hit at a college party or getting snookered and putting yourself and others at risk by getting behind the wheel of your Hummer?"

Meanwhile, a drug war rages south of the Rio Grande, ignited nine years ago when the Mexican government implemented a crackdown on major distributors of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Trafficking cartels, which had previously relied on bribery and corruption to maintain a peaceful co-existence, turned on the authorities and each other to protect their territories.

The violence kills 400 Mexicans a month, 10,000 since 2005, and now spills across the border like a wildfire out of control, to Vancouver, Phoenix, Birmingham, and Atlanta, the new staging ground for the drug trade, where 43 Gulf Cartel members are arrested -- to name only four of the 270 North American cities where Mexican cartels and their affiliates maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors. (Randal Archibold, New York Times, March 23, 2009)

With anywhere from 25 to 50 per cent of the 15,000 metric tons (33 million lbs.) of marijuana consumed annually in the United States smuggled from Mexico, it seems only logical that peace-loving prohibitionists would tout the moral rewards and life-saving effects of smoking less pot. In fact, as recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, several anti-drug groups are now preaching the conscience-laden message that "every bit of marijuana someone smokes is giving more power and more money to the drug cartels in Mexico" and is increasing that country's death toll. (Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal)

It's a fatuous argument, and easily refuted. First, aficionados of the weed contend that the home-grown brand is more organic, more tasty, more pure, and more sought after than the imported product. And rational thinkers like me understand that it's not the drugs that are causing this intractable problem; it's drug prohibition and all the deleterious consequences.

People have smoked marijuana -- the chopped flowers, leaves, or stems of the cannabis plant -- at least since 600 B.C., when the Chinese first recorded its psycho-active effect; and no amount of exhortation, demonization, excoriation, or incarceration is going to change that.

Readers of this blog may remember (One-Year Wonder, January 1, 2009) that my sole experiment with marijuana was an abject failure; never having smoked a cigarette, I was clueless as to how to inhale -- and thus speak with hardly a modicum of credibility as to the allurements of illicit drugs. I never even bothered to broach the subject to a college roommate of mine who spent fifty per cent of his junior and senior years on a glorious high induced by marijuana and the mystical melodies of Jefferson Airplane.

Therefore, I must assume that people smoke marijuana for the same universal reasons they drink alcohol -- which, not being a total prude, I have occasionally and moderately indulged in since the tender age of fifteen -- to release their inhibitions, to facilitate social interaction, to experience sensory pleasure. Or, for some, maybe it's just the taste.

Which is why government attempts to suppress the demand for marijuana by punishing users and dealers are about as hopeless as trying to eradicate speeding and can not succeed. According to psychopharmacologist Ronald Segal, the desire for intoxication in human beings is innate and as basic as other urges.

Some find intoxication in sports, sex, gambling, music, or religion, but "socially-approved ways of intoxication are unavailable or don't work for many . . . The lure of a chemically-assisted high is powerful in America, where many persons consistently and with society's blessing get intoxicated on alcohol or hourly fixes from cigarettes." (Stephen B. Duke and Albert C. Gross, "America's Longest War," pp. 218-219)

In spite of federal and state governments spending upwards of $60 billion annually on the War on Drugs and arresting more than 750,000 individuals every year for marijuana possession alone, there were still 14.5 million users of marijuana in the United States in 2007 compared to 14.6 million in 2002. One in four sixteen-to -seventeen-year-old youths used marijuana in 2007. An estimated 100 million persons (one-third of the U.S. population) have smoked marijuana at some time in their lives, including such notables as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Margaret Mead, Carl Sagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich.

With the weed enjoying such broad and bipartisan popularity, the question arises: how and why have we reached the grievous state of affairs wherein we spend billions of dollars on repeated failures, sanction millions for participating in a relatively harmless activity, and inundate our courtrooms with thousands of non-violent malefactors?

Marijuana had been exempted from the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, in which Congress, responding to pressure from four interest groups -- physicians and pharmacists wary of drug addiction, pragmatic reformers, anti-vice crusaders, and missionary witnesses to the Far East opium trade -- authorized regulation of cocaine and opium derivatives. By 1922, the Act, modified by court rulings, had evolved into a prohibition law, eliminating legal sources of the aforementioned substances and, of course, spawning a criminal black market to supply them.

Enter one Harry Ainslinger, first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, established in 1930, after revelations of corruption in the Narcotics Division of the Treasury Department.

Eager to garner publicity and funding for his nascent organization, Ainslinger launched a crusade against marijuana, cleverly preying on the fears and prejudices of a gullible public to link the purported dangers of the drug to its principal users: Mexican migrants stealing depression-era jobs from white workers and black ghetto social outcasts and speak-easy jazz musicians. The press, particularly the Hearst newspaper chain, took up the charge, blasting marijuana as "a killer drug" which transformed the blacks and Mexicans who smoked it into sexual predators, madmen, and murderers. (Martin Booth, "Cannabis," p.182)

Speculation persists that DuPont petrochemical interests -- which saw hemp, a product of the cannabis plant, as a competitive threat -- were ardent, if silent, supporters of the anti-marijuana campaign.

Ainslinger and his accomplices were successful. In April 1937, Congress initiated hearings on the Marijuana Tax Act, summoning the Commissioner as its chief witness.

Ainslinger regaled his audience with thinly-substantiated narratives of heinous crimes drawn from his extensive "police-blotter" files -- including the case of a twenty-one-year-old boy who slaughtered his family with an axe. "The evidence showed he had smoked marijuana," said Ainslinger, failing to mention that the boy had previously been diagnosed as mentally unstable and afterward was found to to be criminally insane under psychiatric analysis. (Booth, p.184)

Meanwhile, Congressmen belittled or ignored testimony by Assistant Surgeon General William Treadway, who wrote, "As to social or moral degradation associated with cannabis, it probably belongs in the same category as alcohol," and by AMA representative Dr. William Woodward, who stated, "We are told that the use of marijuana causes crime, yet no one has been produced by the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of persons who have been found to be addicted to the marijuana habit." (Mike Gray, "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out," p.80)

The Marijuana Tax Act took effect October 1, 1937. Constitutionally, Congress could not ban marijuana. Instead, it required any person cultivating, transporting, selling, prescribing, or using marijuana to be registered and imposed a levy of $100 an ounce on every transaction (this in the days when a new Ford Model-Y cost $205). (Booth, p.188)

In the early 1950's, with a new international enemy on the horizon, Ainslinger shrewdly sought to link marijuana to heroin, and both to Communism. He painted heroin as part of a Communist plot to poison American values; marijuana became the heroin addict's introduction to drugs, from which he graduated to more dangerous substances.

In 1951, a U.S. Senate Committee blessed the bogus "gateway" theory when it declared that marijuana led to the use of other drugs. Five years later, the Daniel Committee officially confirmed Ainslinger's worst suspicions when it concluded that "subversion by drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China."

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one." With crime the centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda, he identified not just drug dealing but also drug addiction as a major source of crime. Among his initiatives was the consolidation of a number of drug agencies into the supersized Drug Enforcement Agency, which was granted the extraordinary power to organize wire taps and postal inspections, to search without warrants, to confiscate property, to freeze assets, and to arrest on suspicion.

With each successive administration the War on Drugs intensified.

In June 1982, President Reagan announced, "We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We're running up the battle flag." The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 increased federal drug penalties, made it a federal offense to distribute drugs within 1000 feet of a school, and even criminalized owning a roach holder or a packet of rolling papers.

In his first televised address to the nation, George H. W. Bush proclaimed that "the gravest menace facing our nation today is drugs" and called for "an assault on every front" -- including drafting the U. S. military into his anti-drug efforts. In 1986 drug trafficking was officially identified as a threat to national security, and by 1989 Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had made interdiction of the Latin American drug trade a high priority mission of the Department of Defense.

In 1994, when Clinton Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder (whom he subsequently fired) made the "nutty" (to quote former drug czar, William Bennett) suggestion that drug legalization should be studied, Congress responded by getting tougher. The Crime Bill of 1994 established "criminal enterprise" statutes mandating drug sentences of from twenty years to life. The 1998 Higher Education Act disqualified students who had ever been convicted of marijuana possession from receiving federal aid for college -- even though no such disqualification applies to convictions for robbery, rape, or manslaughter. (Gray, p.21)

And yet it's all gone for naught -- all the threats, promises, preachments, penalties, legislation, and expenditures. Illicit recreational drug consumption remains constant. The supply is plentiful; the undaunted users merrily puff away.

The problem with drug prohibition is that it is inherently flawed. The strategy of restricting supply artificially inflates prices to a level which generates tremendous profits and continually motivates suppliers to enter and remain in the market, yet which is not high enough to deter use or suppress demand. Secondly, like the mythical hydra, the sea serpent that Hercules battled, the drug trade is self-reproducing. Stamping it out in one locale simply encourages new recruits or veterans to set up operations elsewhere.

Making war on marijuana users is no less problematic and has produced equally dismal results. In addition to the impossibility of stifling our permanent, insatiable appetite for intoxicating drugs, one is confronted by the improbability of a user ever being caught. Fifteen million Americans smoking a joint six times a year equates to 90 million annual usages; collaring 750,000 of them yields an arrest rate of 0.8% -- very long odds indeed.

Furthermore, drug laws attempt to prohibit conduct that is consensual and victimless; since no one is harmed, there is no victim to press charges or to testify at a trial. Consequently, to detect these crimes, law enforcement must resort to methods ripe for abuse, corruption, and the infringement of civil liberties -- like carrying on systematic surveillance, employing paid informants, or deploying undercover agents who set up entrapment operations.

In fact, drug prohibition has produced a host of harmful consequences which have impacted individuals and society in ways which its proponents could hardly have anticipated and which, even when confronted with the unpleasant truth, they refuse to acknowledge.

It has criminalized the three per cent of the American population hauled into court each year for pursuing what is, for the most part, innocuous, diversionary behavior. For minor convictions, many have suffered significant hardships: probation, mandatory drug testing, loss of employment, loss of child custody, loss of federal student aid, loss of voting privileges, and revocation of driving licenses.

It has undermined the moral message of the law by defining as a crime an activity practiced by a large portion of the public without punishment.

It has consumed tremendous amounts of physical and human resources -- making them unavailable for the investigation, prosecution, and incarceration of rapists, burglars, and murderers.

It has driven the drug business underground, where rival gangs regularly turn to violence and intimidation to defend their turf -- and kill innocent bystanders and potential witnesses in the process.

It has bred corruption in the criminal justice system, affording law enforcement officers myriad opportunities to trade influence for drug profits, by selling information on undercover and surveillance operations, by bartering favorable testimony at hearings and trials, by robbing dealers without fear of reprisal, and by fencing seized assets or drugs -- all of which engender contempt and cynicism for government institutions.

It has fed the money laundering industry -- which converts drug proceeds into spendable cash or usable assets, often enticing honest organizations and individuals into criminal activities.

It has fueled the growth of a prison-industrial complex -- quadrupling the number of those imprisoned since 1980 to 2,300,000, one in every 138 Americans, with federal prisoners leading the way, growing 90 per cent in the last decade, 55 per cent of whom are serving time for a drug offense, compared to 11 per cent for a violent crime.

It has intensified racial mistrust and hostility, sending blacks to prison at seven times the rate of whites, for longer average terms than whites who commit comparable crimes, and disenfranchising thousands of black drug felons. It has created lucrative incentives for drug dealers to saturate urban black ghettos, where substandard housing, pervasive poverty, poor health, and limited job opportunities make fatherless children, school dropouts, homeless people, and individuals facing bleak and hopeless futures avid customers for any means of escape.

It has eroded our Bill of Rights protections, as courts have upheld a multitude of egregious measures: search warrants issued on the flimsiest of suspicions; citizens accosted in cars, airports, trailers, or buses; wiretapping and eavesdropping applications granted as a matter of routine; undercover operations and putative conspiracies validated with a blind eye; judicial discretion sacrificed at the altar of mandatory minimum sentences; and assets forfeited without a criminal conviction, sometimes without a criminal charge.

It has stigmatized and stereotyped illicit drug users as moral pariahs instead of recognizing them as victims of medical, social, or psychological problems -- which discourages their seeking out medical care, forgos the health benefits of drug regulation, thwarts treatment programs that might help the drug dependent, and immerses non-violent drug offenders in the violent culture of prison society.

It has prevented access to therapeutic substances -- like marijuana, which, it has been demonstrated, can alleviate the nausea of chemotherapy, reduce the intraocular pressure of glaucoma, relieve surgical, migraine, and menstrual pain, control multiple sclerosis spasms and some epileptic seizures, and combat depression and insomnia.

The lure of its unconscionable profits has, at one time or another, substantially corrupted the entire governments of Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, and, most recently, Mexico, and sustained native criminal elements which have rent the social fabric of these countries.

And finally, argue the philosophers, drug prohibition is an infringement upon an individual's right to own property -- and assume the risks attendant upon that ownership -- and his right to make choices which may be harmful to himself, as long as those choices do not harm others. Drug users, anti-prohibitionists contend, do not violate others moral rights, and most never do harm to others (unlike users of alcohol or tobacco).

All these consequences might have some justification if marijuana were so dangerous to our well-being that it needed to be outlawed at all costs. But science long ago shattered that myth.

In 1938 New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, skeptical of Harry Ainslinger's exaggerated claims about the effects of marijuana, commissioned a pharmacological study, a clinical study, and a sociological study. The report, released in 1948, "concluded that marijuana was not addictive, did not seriously disturb mental or physical functioning, and did not lead to violence or harder drugs." (Gray, p. 85) To this assessment must be added its potential as a medicine and its value and versatility as a commercial crop.

Today marijuana is condemned and prohibited not because it is harmful but in defense of a specious public morality. "If health were the issue, tobacco and alcohol would have been banned long ago. To accept cannabis is a cultural decision, not a political one." (Booth, p. 401)

It's time to make that decision, to end our seventy-year-old exercise in futility and irrationality, to reverse a portion of this interminable war's destructive consequences, to disable forever the expensive and ubiquitous smoke detectors that invade our privacy. It's time to legalize marijuana.