Marijuana law to be debated at MSU | News-Leader.com | Springfield News-Leader
With a moniker like “Heads vs. Feds,” it would be easy to make light of the marijuana legalization debate scheduled at Missouri State University tonight.

But members of the Student Activity Council, which organized the event, hope it does more than inspire pot puns or wagging fingers.

“Generally, when you get these things happening, you’ll have a lot of people turn out in support for legalization of marijuana,” said Gabriel Cassady, an MSU sophomore who serves on the committee that organized the debate.

“That’s not the goal here,” he said. “It’s not to bash the federal government by any means. It’s an intellectual debate.”

Both sides of the marijuana issue will be represented, Cassady said.

Steven Hager, a marijuana advocate and editor of High Times magazine, will argue in favor of legalization, facing off with Bob Stutman, a former supervisor for the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York who’s been called “the most famous narc in America.”

Cassady said he thinks the debate about marijuana legalization has evolved over the decades.

“In the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, right after the Marihuana Tax Act (of 1937), we had this view of marijuana where it was very much demonized — it was called demon weed, reefer makes you crazy, ‘Reefer Madness,’ ” he said. “A lot of that hype is gone, and we’ve really as a whole started to look at marijuana as a medicine and in terms of its use recreationally …

“The more prevalent issues today are: Is it a gateway drug, does it lead to more harmful things, does it cause apathy? More societal issues.”

While I welcome every public debate we can have about the War on Marijuana, I think it is a bit of a disservice to call it “Heads vs. Feds”. The term “heads” is loaded with connotations of bong-ripping wastoids, whereas support for ending adult marijuana prohibition comes from people running the spectrum from Congressman Barney Frank, entrepreneur George Zimmer, and the late conservative stalwart William F. Buckley, Jr. - hardly a group of “heads”.

I also don’t like the idea that we’re “versus” anyone. We’re not against regulations, laws, and government; we’re trying to take marijuana out of the hands of criminals and black markets and work with our “feds” to regulate and legalize marijuana.

Maybe this is nitpicky of me, but I think these frames matter. When we frame the marijuana legalization debate as “us vs. them”, we a subtly asking mainstream America to pick a side; the cops they respect and trust vs. what they imagine to be a bunch of long-haired tie-dyed hippie freaks looking for permissions to get high. We’ll lose that debate every time.

But if the debate were entitled: “Marijuana: Prohibition vs. Regulation”, now that’s a debate we will win every time. Take the issue away from the people and personalities and make it about the policies.

And one more thing: make it look professional. I was asked to speak at a local college for one of these events, and when I arrived on campus, the signs advertising the event were handmade on large strips of butcher paper, with “got pot?” as the hook (like the “got milk?” ad campaign) and looked very sloppy and were rife with misspellings, including “marijuan”. How do you have a serious debate about marijuana when you can’t even spell it?