On legalization: Who’s afraid? Virginia’s Rep. Wolf

A devoted Stasher named Chris from Virginia wrote to his representative, Frank Wolf, regarding support of the Hinchey/Rohrbacher Amendment that would de-fund DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries.  The salient point of Rep. Wolf’s reply?

“I respect your views but do not share your position on this issue.  I believe that legalization would reduce the stigma associated with drug usage and could aggravate drug abuse problems among our nation’s youth.”

Yes, because that stigma is working so well to stop kids from using drugs now, isn’t it?

Rep. Wolf, in my adult lifetime we have reduced by half the number of kids using cigarettes and tobacco.  We didn’t lock anyone up for cigarettes, we educated them about the real dangers.  We didn’t declare cigarettes illegal, we focused on carding kids, fining establishments that didn’t ID kids, locking up smokes in stores, banning advertising, and taxation.  If that can work for the most addictive drug on the street – nicotine – why can’t that work for cannabis?

As it is, with cannabis illegal, you’ve created a “forbidden fruit” effect.  Rather than stigmatizing pot use, you have glorified it by its outlaw status.  You’ve compounded that effect by producing over-the-top propaganda about cannabis that every teen knows is bullshit, like cannabis will make them shoot their friend, run over a girl on her bike, and let their kid sister drown.

In the states that have legalized cannabis for medical use, we’ve seen the teen use of cannabis decline, almost as if legal medical use has created another kind of stigma – that pot is boring medicine for sick old people.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Stashers: the “What about the children?” argument is all our opponents have left.  Once you have them there, you ask, “why then does the government ‘send the wrong message’ about drinking, smoking, and gambling?”  This takes the prohibitionist to The Land of It’s Too Late to Ban Those, which is right down the Why Would We Add More Dangerous Substances? highway.  This is the prohibitionists’ Waterloo, because you just point out that, no, it’s not too late; we banned Alcohol in my granddad’s lifetime and lotteries weren’t legal in most of America until I graduated high school, and in both cases we found that if we banned those industries, the bootleggers and the numbers runners would take them over and cause crime and violence.  We don’t allow drinking, smoking, and gambling because it is “too late”, it is because we tried and realized prohibition does not work.

Usually they will then work on the danger angle, saying, “we already have enough problems with alcohol, why add another dangerous substance?”  I’m sure y’all can tear the “dangerous substance” part to bits, and I usually do, but another angle to add is to puncture the “why add” portion of it.  Add?  You act as if marijuana doesn’t exist and legalization will suddenly make it appear!  25 million people smoke pot every year; everyone who wants to smoke pot already is!  There is no “adding” marijuana, it is already here and has been for forty years!  The question is why you want to add the danger of criminal control and black market violence to marijuana, a substance which by itself was noted by the DEA’s own administrative law judge as being “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man” over twenty years ago!

Send your JPGs of scanned Congressional or White House replies to stash@norml.org, and I’ll be glad to rant over them.