Jesse Gordon on Drugs Editor-in-chief, OnTheIssues.org

Legalize medical marijuana

A: Politicians won’t offer a strong view on medical marijuana because they fear losing votes as a result. I’d say that the politicians are right in surmising that the American public isn’t ready for legalizing pot in any form. But why is that? The primary reason is the propaganda demonizing marijuana. Americans have been subjected to heavy advertising and other forms of “information” for two decades now telling us that our brains will be fried if we touch marijuana or anything else. Is it surprising then that people have come to believe that it’s true?

The path to legalizing medical marijuana has a lot of steps:
1. End the Drug War’s propaganda campaign against marijuana.
2. Let people judge rationally about medical marijuana’s benefits and risks.
3. Let politicians believe that people won’t vote them out of office for taking anything but the hardest line on drugs.
4. Then medical marijuana will become legal, because of course it makes sense!

Replace hypocrisy of drug prohibition with common sense

A: The needed course of action is to continue pointing out the fallacies and hypocrisy of drug prohibition, collect up influential people who believe that they’re fallacies and hypocrisies, and then wait for the current hysteria to end.

The Governor of New Mexico was pilloried by some for calling for legalization, but was held up as an example of common-sense thinking by many others. And there have been other high politicians who have touted common-sense too-then-Secretary of State George Schultz refused to take a urine test for drugs, and hence single-handedly weakened Reagan’s federal employee drug policy.

I thought in 1992 that Clinton had made a real difference by admitting (sort of) that he had smoked pot, and winning anyway. Gore at that time admitted fully that he had smoked pot, and I assumed that when he ran, he would be common-sensical about pot. But his stances are as pro-Drug War as Bush’s, so that will have to wait for the next election