Legalize It, Then Criticize It…

New York State may soon embrace medical marijuana. We’d be better off if the government legalized it outright. Why talk half-steps when other states have already made cannabis legal?

It was Tommy Chong who put it to New York via social media, saying that we were behind the high times. New York used to be the place that this kind of progress was launched, Chong mourned, now we’re catching up with Colorado and Washington.  

Tommy Chong is right. Marijuana should be legal in all 50 states. It’s ludicrous that people are in jail for growing it or smoking it or having a big wad of it rolled into a cigar leaf or in a brownie or anal suppository or however else people are getting it into their bodies today. Legalize it.  

The people have spoken. In times that it’s been put to a vote, voters support legalization of marijuana. Whether it’s medical marijuana, which is more widespread, or the outright legalization that we’ve seen recently in Washington and Colorado. But beyond that, even in places that still enforce draconian laws against the weed, marijuana use is very high (pun intended).

We are not far from the prohibition of marijuana being as antiquated and ridiculous as the prohibition against alcohol that started almost 100 years ago. That prohibition is rightfully considered a joke today, and our grandchildren will look down their noses at the outlawing of marijuana in the 20^th Century. Rightly so.

So let us join our voices to the millions that already call for legalizing electric lettuce in New York. Let the City lead the way and hopefully the state will follow. Let the fifty states tax and regulate cannabis like they do tobacco and alcohol. The government can’t stop people from smoking it, so it might as well make a few bucks to help keep the roads paved.

But where there is support for legalization, let’s also support some healthy distrust of the marijuana industry. Wanting to legalize it shouldn’t stop us from criticizing it. Marijuana does not belong on a list of outlawed substances (if any do is another matter), but that doesn’t mean it belongs in our bodies.

There is a lot of awareness and opposition to genetically modified foods and the potential dangers they pose to people’s health. There’s a greater demand now for natural and organic foods made free from the use of dangerous chemicals or genetic manipulation. Yet none of this scrutiny is being applied to marijuana cultivation.

If you’re not willing to eat a plant that was grown with a genetically modified seed, then don’t smoke something that’s named for a Star Trek character. I’ll do what I can to avoid food made possible by Monsanto, but I’m also not going to smoke something named “Vulcan Mind Meld No. 6.” Do we really need to be a lazier, slower-witted country that eats even more junk food at two o’clock in the morning?

Let’s definitely legalize the chronic, but let’s also approach it with the same skepticism as we would any other element of big agribusiness. And that’s what marijuana is: big business. No one is selling weed out the kindness of their heart. Tobacco and alcohol companies are rightly treated with suspicion. The people hawking ganja are no more saintly.

Medical marijuana is great, but the overwhelming majority of people using weed are using it to get high for its own sake. They have every right to do that. But unless you have a serious medical condition, marijuana isn’t good for you. I want to live in a world where people are not persecuted for smoking a plant. But I also know that the world does not need more pot heads. 

Let’s increase the sanity of the conversation. Marijuana legalization is the right thing to do. But let us embrace legalization of marijuana without having to embrace marijuana itself. 

Five Good Ideas Championed by Hippies

It is good and right to hate hippies. Hippie culture is a celebration of weakness and degradation. It’s given us a slice of the population that is equal parts useless and obnoxious and helped home-birth the self-congratulating, smug and cloying “progressive” culture that clogs the brains of many otherwise intelligent people. Hippies often smell funny and they have terrible clothes.

Hippies were the first cultural group in modern history that aligned political causes to a counterculture to such an extent that many legitimate causes became wholly unpalatable to mainstream Americans. I’m convinced that many of the people in Nixon’s silent majority were there not because they really supported U.S. policies in Vietnam, but because they detested the hippies that embodied the vocal opposition more than they distrusted Nixon.

One could almost propose that hippies are some brilliantly successful psych-ops invention meant to quell popular opposition to interventionist military policies. How can we make opposition to undeclared foreign war abroad culturally abhorrent in a democratic society? Gentlemen, I present to you: the Hippy. 

But however much it pains us, we must give credit where credit is due, and hippies have actually embraced some good ideas over the years. They may not have invented anything useful, but their knee-jerk embrace of anything countercultural has actually put a few good items in their erratically-cast hemp nets.

Legalizing marijuana: This is such a widely embraced idea now that it has almost completely escaped the cultural ghetto of the hippie. But without hippies marijuana would not have entered popular culture to the extent it has. Smoking marijuana may turn lazy people into completely useless people and dumb people into outright retards, but throwing people in jail for smoking it makes as much sense as prohibition. It will be legal in our lifetime, and future generations will look at the laws against marijuana the way we look at the outlawing of alcohol. Even elderly people in Florida are toking up before hitting the all-you-can-eat buffet.

Organic food: I once thought that organic food was a wonton excess of effete snobs and tree-hugging imbeciles. But the more information that is available today about the practices of many large agricultural corporations and the effects of many of the additives used regularly in food, the more organic food looks more unavoidably sane. With the increasing popularity of community supported agriculture, it’s possible to eat organic food without entering the orbit of the vegetarian or vegan planets.

Bicycles: Hippies embraced bicycles and helped turn a favorite childhood toy into its own obnoxious subculture. The cyclists who flout the law by breezing through red lights and riding the wrong way down one-way streets and then demand the same rights to the roads as cars share the same sense of entitlement as the hippies. But bicycles are beneficial in and of themselves and for city dwellers they are faster than most public transportation for getting around. (Full hypocrisy disclosure: I own a pickup truck but not a bicycle).

Co-ops: They are voluntary exchanges that organizers can invite or exclude whomever they want. When people think of co-ops in New York, they usually think of apartment buildings controlled by old curmudgeons or supermarkets run by bickering lefties, but who says you can’t start your own for whatever purposes you want? They are good ways to avoid the middleman and save money on things. Illegal day care co-ops are popping up as well; as parents do an end-run around long lists for local kindergarten classes and prohibitively expensive licensed daycare centers.

Preserving National Parks and Forests: Why do we leave it to the hippies to rant and rave about the loss or pollution of public land? It’s not anti-capitalist to want to have a national park. Does the name Theodore Roosevelt mean anything to you? If you like hunting, you like lots of unspoiled nature.

Don’t stop hating hippies; they are a malodorous race of useless clowns. But don’t neglect good ideas just because it may have been embraced by hippies.