“These are not the droids you’re looking for.” – Asa Hutchinson says “Public is in no mood to legalize marijuana”

Some evidence for Mr. Hutchinson - support for legalization increases about 1% per year since President George HW Bush, and 6%-10% overall since Mr. Hutchinson was Drug Czar.

From CNN’s American Morning, former Drug Czar Asa Hutchinson:

When it comes to the debate on legalization of marijuana, we can all have confidence in the greatness of our democracy. Ultimately the voters decide the direction of our country. Thus far there is no evidence that the public is in any mood to legalize marijuana or other currently illegal drugs.

CNN Poll, same page, today:

In Arkansas, a few years back, a statewide ballot initiative could not even get on the ballot because the proponents could not garner enough signatures. Nationwide, recent ballot initiatives have focused on medical marijuana or enforcement policy.

The advocates of legalization are trying to chip away on the fringes of the legalization debate but they know there is not a sufficient popular movement for legalization.

Because a statewide ballot initiative cannot overturn a federal law.  Who wants to put a couple of million dollars into a statewide initiative campaign that would be enjoined the minute it passes because of conflict with federal law?  Medical marijuana, lowest-priority, and decriminalization aren’t “the fringes of the legalization debate”, they are the only possible tactics at the state and local level under an oppressive federal law.

Parents are in no mood to make another harmful drug more accessible and socially acceptable for the youth.

Uh, 84% of high school seniors say it is fairly easy to get pot.  That means in a classroom of twenty seniors (don’t laugh, teachers, pretend our classrooms only have twenty kids per), seventeen of them can probably go out and get a baggie of weed within an hour.  Is it your contention that a legalized marijuana market where adults have to go to an over-21 store and show ID will mean those other three hapless kids will finally be able to score?

As for more “socially acceptable”, all the data on teens’ perception of risk, availability, and acceptability have risen since the focus on marijuana in the war on drugs began back in the first Bush administration.  Pot is all over popular movies, TV, music, and magazines.  42% of American high school seniors have tried marijuana.  Is it your contention that legalized marijuana will mean more of them will try it?  Because after all, it is tolerated – socially acceptable, you might say – for adults in the Netherlands, and only 19% of their high school seniors have tried it.

The current argument is that legalization is the right way to solve the cartel violence in Mexico. I disagree.

If you accept that argument then we should legalize cocaine to reduce the cartel violence in Colombia. That is not the right logic and the violence will continue.

These are the rhetorical tools they’ve got left, folks.  They can’t bring up “gateway drug” anymore without being laughed off the stage.  They can’t deny medicinal applications for marijuana because it keeps winning elections by 2-to-1 margins.  Hutchinson begins with what I call the “These are not the droids you’re looking for” argument: yeah, sure, you think legalizing marijuana is a perfectly valid solution, but nobody else around you does.  You’re all alone in that crazy thinking because America doesn’t want to legalize marijuana and you’re unAmerican for thinking it’s a good idea!

The other tool is to lump in marijuana with drugs.  It’s funny how legalization of alcohol to reduce cartel violence in America didn’t mean we had to legalize cocaine and marijuana (oh, wait, cocaine and marijuana were still federally legal then!), but somehow legalization of marijuana means we must legalize cocaine. And the unspoken implication of “legalization” means marijuana, crack, coke, heroin, meth, acid, shrooms, and MDMA will all be available at the front counter of the 7-Eleven next to the Slim Jims and the Snickers bars. Notice it’s always about opposing the legalization of marijuana; it’s never about supporting the prohibition of marijuana  – it’s easier to get people to fear an undefinable future catastrophe than to get them to support an untenable present reality.

This slippery slope is required because few people are scared by legal pot anymore.  There are hundreds of thousands of legal pot smokers on America’s West Coast and their businesses and government all still seem to function (again, try not to laugh, Californians).  But cocaine = Tony Montana = guns and violence = crackheads, and that scares the hell out of us.

The only thing legalization will accomplish is to increase the use of harmful drugs in the United States. The cartels will just move to another illegal drug to make their cash and if there is not a current market for the drug, then they will work to create that market.

Wow!  Mexican drug cartels are the most incredible entrepreneurs in the world!  When marijuana is legalized and 60% of their cash flow is stopped, they are going to immediately make that up by creating a market for another drug!  Somehow, they are going to replace the market of 22 million adult Americans who use marijuana at least once per year with a market of 5.3 million adult Americans who use cocaine once per year, 2.3 million who use stimulants like meth and other, and the 350,000 who use heroin at least once per year.  They would have add three times the number of people currently using those drugs to make up for the 22 million now-legal marijuana users, and that’s assuming 22 million new coke / meth / smack users would generate the same demand and profits as marijuana users.

Somehow, when all 22 million of us are able to get good weed at decent prices in adults-only stores, 22 million more of us who don’t currently use coke / meth / heroin are going to start using.  All because the Mexican drug cartels have some incredible marketing plan that will make people suddenly love coke / meth / heroin.

Or wait, I know, they’ll invent a new drug!  Maybe Gleemonex!

For more insanity I haven’t time to completely deconstruct, see Drug Legalization: “A Great Idea Whose Time Has Not Come”, from Robert M. Stutman, a former Special Agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, who brings you such great factoids like “Most experts agree that a fair number for the increase in users, if we make all drugs available to anyone who wants them, is about five times the present number of users. Five times 20 million is about 100 million drug users with an average addiction rate of 25% (depending on drug and age). Therefore, we end up with an additional 25 million addicts on top of the 20 million alcoholics we already have.”  Really?  Because my calculator says five times 22 million annual adult marijuana smokers is 110 million adults.  You’re telling me legal weed means there will be more adults over 18 who smoke pot every year than there are adults over 18 who are female? (108 million, as of 2000 Census.)  Oh, and not to mention the dependence – not addiction – rate for marijuana is only 9%, compared to 15% for alcohol and 32% for tobacco.

Stutman is displaying one of the other wretched tools in the prohibitionist arsenal, the “Why would we want another harmful legal drug?” argument.  This one flows from pointing out how awful alcohol abuse is in this country and if we have X amount of misery from alcoholics, why would we want to add Y more misery from druggies?  This begs the question that if the alcohol is so bad, why don’t we prohibit it, too?  Oh, right, we did, and it failed, because criminalizing drugs doesn’t eliminate drugs, it creates crime.  The response is usually “well, we tried, but alcohol was already so popular that we couldn’t stop it,” the notion being that if only they’d managed to prohibit alcohol earlier, it would’ve succeeded (when, ancient Rome? Babylonia?), and that with drugs we managed to make them illegal just in time before they got too popular to prohibit.

When this is all the prohibitionists have left in their arsenal, it feels like they have pea shooters and we have cannons.  Problem is, they’re holed up in a big castle with a moat full of alligators that has stood strong for four generations.