cannabis claim it is. The drug itself is not very addictive, or for that matter, universally inviting. What leads young people to further substance abuse and bad behavior isn’t the pot... It’s the transaction that got them the pot – handing cash to the creepy kid with the backpack. For a lot of young people, buying weed is their first contact with an actual criminal. They learn criminals can be nice, and they’ll sell them things they want. And there are no IDs required, or rewards programs, or even receipts. What is learned here is more the problem than what is bought here. Put it in stores where their friend’s older brother can buy it for them, just like the beer and peppermint schnapps they threw up last weekend. Let the creepy kid with the backpack get a real job at Burger King. The worst that can happen is kids who might never have smoked pot will try it. Maybe, like me, they won’t like it and, unlike me, go happily and soberly through their lives. Or, they do like it, and they start reading fantasy novels and name their first dogs after Tolkien characters and grow up and have kids of their own and put the bud away in an Altoid box until a friend starts chemo and needs some help... It could be worse. There are not very many things you could subject to the scrutiny marijuana has endured for decades that would come out the other side looking like a great idea. What if chocolate croissants were illegal but easily acquired on the black market, and there was a movement to take them mainstream? But the fat! The carbs! The obesity epidemic! They’re French! Is this what you want your children eating?
Apply this to chainsaws, snow machines, handyman jacks, guns, and bacon. None of these things would make it through the What About the Children gauntlet of today. Alcohol was famously made illegal for a stretch of time in this country. The glamour of drinking increased under Prohibition while creating a new class of wealthy criminals because honest business people were cut from the deal. I’d rather see the next cannabis tycoons on the cover of Forbes than being frog-walked like El Chapo from a Federal courthouse trailing a wake of corpses and ruined lives. In truth, I think the resistance to legal weed is all cultural surface tension, not politics. When aging progressives think about pot, too many of them are reminded of their idiotic youths – listening to Yes , campaigning for McGovern. That stupid dog, Bilbo. When conservatives think about it, they are also reminded of the progressives’ idiotic youths and how insufferable they were. Neither side wants to go there again. It’s a young person’s world. Let them make the most of it. Besides, the stupider they act, the smarter I’ll feel. Tom Bodett is an author and broadcast personality heard regularly on NPR’s satirical weekend news quiz Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me . He has been the national brand spokesman for Motel 6 since 1986, which allows him to live in the middle of a hayfield in Windham County, Vermont, rather than near an actual job.
Headshot of Tom courtesy of Beowulf Sheehan
American Consequences 23
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