Is pot-smoking merely a “bad habit”?

Last updated on: August 14, 2016 at 8:17 am by Jane the Actuary

Is pot-smoking merely a “bad habit”? 2016-08-14T08:17:07-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Look, I know that there are significant differences of opinion among reasonable people of good will on the topic of marijuana. The only person I know who smoked pot was my Uncle S., who, by the way, ended up in jail, then afterwards went to live with my other uncle and his wife, and suffered a mysterious stroke that left him paralyzed and ultimately killed him. Was it the pot-smoking? My parents believe so.

What’s the right answer on the question of how dangerous pot-smoking is? Does it produce lethargic failures who spend their time getting high rather than being productive members of society? Or would those potheads be failures anyway, just angrier, drunken failures? How large an increase in pot users would we see if it’s as readily available as liquor? Or is the above irrelevant, because the right of responsible smokers, who get high in the evenings when everyone else is just settling into their favorite TV show, but show up and put in a good day’s work the next day, trump social concerns about the others? I don’t know.

What’s very worrisome about the “experiments” in Oregon and Colorado and the medical marijuana laws elsewhere (particularly in places such as California, where everyone is quite open about the fact that anyone who wants to can find a doctor to diagnose them with a suitable condition) is that we’re making a mockery of the law. Large numbers of Americans view laws on pot-smoking as somewhat arbitrary, somewhat like Catholic “laws of the church” on not eating meat on Fridays in Lent.

And Obama’s recent comments — as written up in the Washington Post, but really, all over the internet — are quite disturbing in this respect. Here’s the key line: “I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

He goes on to say, smoking marijuana is “not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.”

What Obama has said is ultimately that he thinks a major piece of American criminal law criminalizes something that’s simply a “bad habit” and a “waste of time.” Well, guess what, plenty of things are “bad habits” and “wastes of time” — watching excessive TV is, or spending all day playing Grand Theft Auto when your mom is after you to get a job. But we don’t criminalize “bad habits.”

If Obama truly believes this, then he truly believes that large numbers of people are locked up unjustly. But what is he doing? Nothing.

If laws criminalizing pot-selling and possession are unjust, he should, in his capacity as president of the United States, actually propose legislation changing the laws at the federal level. Maybe he’s too busy reading Angie Merkel’s e-mail and watching sports on ESPN to get around to this.

But maybe he doesn’t really recognize the concept of an “unjust” law — which is even more dangerous, if that means that he thinks of laws as fundamentally arbitrary anyway and not reflecting any great truth in what is criminal and what isn’t. And if Obama’s solution to inconvenient federal pot laws is just to ignore them, what else is he ignoring?

Pot-law enforcement. Immigration law. NSA spying. IRS scandals. Is it all a fundamental disregard for law on the part of our vaunted Constitutional law professor President?

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