Yuppie Prohibition League Denounces Pot Legalization —Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone
I think all of us who have smoked marijuana will admit that it’s a drug that doesn’t bring out one’s inner Einstein. That said, nobody is dumber, or more that matter more dangerous, than a drunk, and we long ago realized that we had to make alcohol legal.
That’s because the legalization question, whether about pot or alcohol, is never really a referendum on the drugs in question. It’s much more a referendum on prohibition, which didn’t work with an extremely dangerous, addictive and destructive drug like alcohol, and makes even less sense with marijuana.The Brooks column is particularly infuriating because in just a few hundred words it perfectly captures why marijuana needs to be legalized. Here’s this grasping, status-obsessed yuppie who first admits that that he smoked an illegal drug without consequence in his youth, then turns around and tells us, as a graying and bespectacled post-adult, that it would be best if the drug remained illegal for the masses.
Would David Brooks feel the same way about drug laws if he was one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans arrested in weed-related incidents every year (it was over 700,000 people in 2012)? If he’d been prevented from getting a student loan or getting a state job because of such a bust? If he’d lost a professional license, or had his property seized, or even had a child taken away from him?