Yuppie Prohibition League Denounces Pot Legalization

[phantom power]

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?

We'll never know, because by and large, people like David Brooks, or me for that matter, don't suffer serious consequences for weed arrests. Most people who get busted on pot charges are non-white and from poor neighborhoods: In the Bloomberg years, there were as many as 50,000 pot arrests a year in New York City, the overwhelming majority of which were black or Hispanic people. Brooks should ask himself how sending people to sit in Rikers on weed charges (I've met such people) reflects upon our "moral ecology," especially when it's almost guaranteed that the cops who sent that person there also smoked pot in high school and/or college.

Meanwhile, your typical well-heeled white kid blazes up unapologetically throughout his or her school years, and may even spend much of that time tooling around the country watching Phish concerts and pounding Chex Mix with eyes glazed over in open worship of weed culture. And he or she generally never gets in serious trouble.

Later this same youngster often leaves school, ditches the tie-dye in favor of a bunch of V-neck sweaters from Barney's, and spends the rest of life from mid-twenties on trying to become respectable – he or she hopes in the end to maybe become a New York Times columnist, or a Senator or a Governor or the Vice-President or President of the United States, at which point past marijuana use is quietly excused.

This career path is allowed in places where the police are not encouraged to go rampaging through dorm rooms or asked to do random pocket checks of all pedestrians as a matter of course – you'll never see a stop-and-frisk in the Hamptons. Therefore people who grow up in these environments tend to look at the legalization issue solely through the lens of, "Well, all we're doing by making it legal is telling kids that it's okay."

No, actually, by making it legal, we're deciding that letting people get high is a lesser evil compared to a person's life being derailed forever by a pointless and intrinsically hypocritical marijuana arrest. But Brooks/Brown/Scarborough wouldn't know anything about that, apparently.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/yuppie-prohibition-league-denounces-pot-legalization-20140103

[cali]

1. such an asswipe- of monumental proportions. this one's for you, brooksie.

[enough]

2. K&R. Short and sweet by Matt Taibbi. Thanks for posting this. (nt)

[KurtNYC]

3. I note that the 2 states that legalized this year are among the whitest in the nation

Washington State: 3.9% African American
Colorado: 4%

[SunSeeker]

4. Yup, all the heavy stoners I know are white males. nt

[belltower]

7. meh

The ones I know are self-medicating: they who find their culture utterly depraved immoral and unethical in too many ways. Who feel somewhat responsible yet certain they're powerless to do anything substantive about it. Who feel permanently filthy by their association with that paragon of Western culture, the United States of America. Who simply cannot allow themselves a fast political suicide, the cowards that they are.

Tell me, what's the point of NOT being stoned or drunk or whatever, every day of the week? What is there to live for, when the species will soon be extinct? Take all academic research for instance -- what's the point of pushing an 'envelope' that's on fire? Take commercial investment -- what's the point of building ANYTHING for the future, if the future is "toast"?

They're many ones who've been weeping every single damn day since 1963.

So drink up, smoke up, snort up, shoot up. All to forget the pain of discovery that the liars cannot be defeated. All we have left is the small satisfaction we'll get as they wipe their stupid grin off their mother fucking faces, when it finally dawns on their reptilian brains "uh-oh".

[belltower]

9. related link

Most-americans-have-a-gloomy-outlook-for-life-in-2050

[blackspade]

5. Prohibition is a bust.

The drug war is run and perpetuated by hypocrites.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

6. I didn't smoke pot until I was 38. It didn't do much for me

and I have smoked it maybe 4 times. Now that it is legal in Washington later this year, that may change.

But then I also never got more than a light beer buzz through my 20's until I got really drunk for the first time when I was 28.

[Warren DeMontague]

8. "less able to compete with the Chinese"? Steve Jobs smoked truckloads of pot.

It's not the creative stoner class that is a drag on American society, it's crap like the fucking "pundit class".

What's the last new idea David Fucking Brooks had?

[90-percent]

10. It's a proven fact that pot is dangerous to your health and well being

If you get arrested for having some a significant part of your life will be ruined forever.

And if you're jailed you loose your freedom and a good deal of your innocence as a human being.

Oh, wait a minute. It's not the pot itself doing this damage, it's our superstitious and ignorant pot Prohibition laws inflicting that much human misery!

-90% Jimmy