Dude, You’re Harshing My Mellow

I’m inclined to take a slightly different position on the manner in which Obama answered the now infamous “pot question” in his online town hall than Freddie and Andrew have done. While I might understand the frustration they express over the way that Obama chose to dismissive route with his answer and the way that the mainstream media have chosen to handle the question itself, I can’t help but see all of this sniggering and guffawing in a relatively positive light.

Listen, there was a time in America where the suggestion that prohibition laws around marijuana ought to be revised would be met with bug-eyed, spittle- launching, vein-bursting retorts of indignation and outrage — there are, in fact, some areas of the country where this remains true. But the fact that the President of the United States and most of the mainstream media felt sufficiently comfortable to outwardly express their amusement with issue at hand signals, as Freddie indicates, a substantial shift in perceptions about marijuana usage amongst a not insignificant proportion of Americas and indicates that, as Andrew points out, there we are in the midst of a generational shift in the people making major decisions about the direction of the country.

Daniel Larison points out that the tendency for proponents of marijuana reform to dis-identify with the actual users of the substance tends to greatly weaken the arguments there presented and focuses on how the image that people seek to unburden themselves is that of the classic stoner. I believe it to be true that proponents of marijuana legal reform suffer from a problem in optics, but it’s not so much that of the motivationally challenged and intellectually stunted stoner — a trope that seems to have find a place of love in popular culture. Rather, I would suggest that the perception problems has to do with the high-minded and culturally tone deaf approach that a majority of reformist persistently cling to in spite of the obvious changes in public perception around the issue that now dominate discussion.

Says Freddie,

That’s the attitude of “serious” people everywhere, that advocating changing our destructive, futile, expensive and cruel marijuana laws has to demonstrate that the person so advocating is some burned-out, disaffected stoner who just wants to smoke up and tune out. You get that from the mainstream media and most of our national politicians all the time, the absolute refusal to take reforming our marijuana laws seriously. And that’s unfair, and corrosive to democracy, and has severe negative consequences for our policy.

And offers Andrew,

I’m tired of having the Prohibition issue treated as if it’s trivial or a joke. It is neither. It is about freedom and it’s deadly serious.

There is nothing inherently wrong about either proposition, the points that each make are perfectly valid. But the question is whether choosing to make those particular points and choosing to drape them in the linguistic robes of persecution and emancipation is the most effective means of getting your point across. By lights, the answer to that question is no, not currently.

In this regard, reformists continue to run an outmoded race to the top of moral grandstanding against competitors who are, for all intents and purposes, lagging far behind, winded and unable to complete the course as it now exists. Such charged language was most certainly useful when the majority of your audience saw the use of marijuana as the first step towards a life of object moral degradation, but it only reinforces a notion that proponents are not to be taken seriously — and therefore the issue isn’t to be taken seriously — when the majority of your audience already find the use of marijuana a banal fact.

As such, proponents of reform would be best suited to tailor their rhetorical sails to the prevailing winds and premise their arguments on the underlying banality of pot smoking to which Obama and others’ sniggers point. While it might be true, as Larison notes,  that people are be inclined to repeal a law once its enforcement i seen as an “intolerable imposition”, in this case I think it is more likely that the golden key to gaining traction unlocks the door revealing the underlying irrelevance of the law, the waste that it engenders, and employs those arguments that resist the temptation to build the issue up into more than it is in the minds of the public for the primary purpose of gratification.

Some battles end with the thunder of heavy mortar fire and the upheval of the earth around you, others fade quietly into a night of confused intentions and inevitable attrition. The key to sucess is knowing in which kind of battle you’re engaged and fashioning your strategy appropriately.

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