By an accident of fate I happened to pass through Library Mall at exactly 4:20 this afternoon, and was therefore reminded that today is that strangest of holidays, the day for publicly flaunting a taboo which has lost its tabooness everywhere except in the pages of the lawbooks. And I was reminded, too, of the marginal status of one of my original political, or perhaps cultural, heterodoxies—I’m the rare liberal under the age of thirty who doesn’t smoke pot, and who isn’t entirely comfortable with the fact that just about everyone I know does.
That’s not to say I oppose the legalization of marijuana. On the contrary, I enthusiastically support the legalization, regulation, and taxation of its manufacture, distribution, and consumption. I differ from the bulk of my contemporaries, however, with two apostasies. First, I’m pretty strongly opposed to partial legalization, which is usually formulated under a program of decriminalization. As I argued in an editorial five years ago, decriminalization effectively amounts to a legal sop to the upper class. By driving up the demand for drugs amongst well-behaved (and well-lawyered) consumers of marijuana, decriminalization makes life even worse for the socially marginal, lower-class producers and dealers of the stuff, who enjoy none of the criminal relief offered by decriminalization efforts. I can think of no more clear and tragic proof of the nature of this inequality than the 2009 shooting of Justin Cosby. The Harvard students who were at the demand end of the transaction which brought Cosby to Harvard and to his death were not prosecuted, nor even named, and went about their lives, probably still buying pot to this day. Justin Cosby, however, is dead, and the other members of the supply end of the transaction are serving long jail sentences.
But, more to the point, what really troubles me about casual pot culture is its central ethical assertion: Laws that I don’t like and don’t think are fair are laws that I don’t have to follow. Are drug laws stupid, regressive, superstitious, and cranky? Yes. Do they cause deep social harm and injustice? Absolutely. I truly encourage every sensible American to vote in lawmakers who are committed to rethinking our nation’s absurd handling of drug issues. But our disagreement with a given law does not give us the right to ignore it. The argument seems to run that when a law conflicts with our own ethical system, our own ethical system wins. I see it the other way: participating in a pluralistic, democratic society requires one to knuckle under at times, and to submit oneself to the common agreements which have been decided upon by a system of government which belongs to the people. After all, Christian fundamentalists who want to bomb abortion clinics probably feel that ethics is on their side and that this righteousness supersedes the law—but I, and I imagine the majority of my fellow young liberal-thinking Americans, expect them to behave according to the laws which we as a society have jointly agreed upon.
Here I part ways somewhat with a writer I admire very much: Thoreau, who outlined the first justification for civil disobedience by refusing to pay his taxes in opposition to the Mexican-American War. I agree with Thoreau that there are a certain set of categorical ethical commitments which, when broken by the government, allow and indeed oblige us to break our submission to the law. But this set of commitments must be small and must carry first-order moral weight. Does a billionaire who hides his money from the taxman because he disagrees with the ethics social welfare carry the same moral exemption which Thoreau claimed for himself? I certainly don’t think so. And I certainly don’t think that smoking pot—which is a personal indulgence, not a statement of deeply-held principle—achieves a level of moral weightiness that justifies this self-exemption.
Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with smoking pot as such, nor do I think it ought to be illegal. What I think is wrong—and what many of my contemporaries, astoundingly, seem to think is completely fine—is the belief that we have a right to excuse ourselves from those laws which we find inconvenient. Perhaps this makes me seem like a Javert-like curmudgeon, obsessed with enforcing compliance to an arbitrary law. What I see it as, instead, is a commitment to the agreement which makes democracy possible: the compact made between citizens to acquiesce not only to those laws which we like, but also to those which we dislike.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2012/04/20/328/