Marijuana legalization a chance to stir the pot

The first time I ever smoked weed, I was a passenger in a moving car.

I am not proud of that fact. It’s something I tried very hard to forget I’d ever done. Let’s be clear (not that many young, impressionable folks will likely read the newspaper, though they should, while they are a-gittin’ off my lawn): intoxicants and motor vehicles aren’t just a bad mix. They’re criminal, reckless, and dangerous. Since that time, I’ve written and reported on the consequences of those actions enough to have seen and heard and smelled how close I was (without realizing it) to a grisly, horrible death.

Then I caught a distant whiff of the familiar smell, outside an upbeat meeting of marijuana fans shortly after the vote, and the memory of my previous stupidity came wafting back.

However, the car in this story — a weather-and-baseball-bat beaten, 1980s-era AMC Concord, which could be started without a key simply by turning the ignition — wasn’t just an automobile. It was a sanctuary away from teachers, books, parents, cops and rules. A car remains the last unregulated place of late adolescence, the place where we could “get away with it.”

In attempting to thwart one side effect of marijuana consumption, government officials dating back to the Progressive Era had inadvertently pushed our hazy, giggly world close to the edge of one final disaster. If marijuana alone could not have killed us, then being 17 and in possession of extremely poor judgment certainly could have.

Those predisposed against regulation might take this as cause for libertarianism. I take it as a sign that no regulation is without peril. Greatest of these is the danger of becoming injured by preventable evils.

As legislators and local officials struggle with the who, why and what of marijuana, it’s hard not to raise my hand to object to statements that run contrary to my own past experience with drug use. When people publicly compare marijuana to other drugs, like heroin or methamphetamine, or overstate the risk of addiction, or swear the drug use of their youth is much different from mine, I groan a bit inside. When a member of the Senate Finance Subcommittee compared edibles to a loaded gun, I laughed out loud.

If loaded guns are dangerous, where’s the legislation for them? I look forward to reading it.

The marijuana legalization issue needs caution, though maybe not where you’d expect. I chuckled aloud when reading in a Mayo Clinic study that frequent cannabis use constitutes a “reverse gateway” to tobacco. Marijuana made it seem like smoking was OK for this asthmatic, which in turn made it seem that smoking cigarettes was OK. By the time I quit last August, I was up to a pack a day (two packs on long days). At least one doctor has said my lungs may never fully recover.

I have a foot planted squarely on the worried side, too. A family member’s struggles with marijuana use and abuse, and the resulting depression, among other things, cost him a full scholarship to a prestigious American university. (He ultimately dropped out, did some growing up, and now has a master’s degree in a field I barely understand). While I’ve never seen anyone turned into an out-and-out zombie, the friend who doesn’t grow out of his pot phase is so common, it’s pop culture cliché.

I may claim enlightenment, but I’m not immune to the psychology of this issue. I recently spent an afternoon taking pictures of marijuana for the paper, and every time a new type of marijuana came out with an accompanying explanation (courtesy the folks at Midnight Greenery, who know more about the subject of cultivation and manufacturing than I could ever hope to), I fought the urge to tell them to hide the dope before we all ended up in jail.

Marijuana legalization is an invaluable opportunity, but it’s not the one either side of the debate claims. If Colorado is any indication, the government will likely make some money, though not as much as expected, and some new costs will likely blunt the impact of those new revenues. People may die as a result of legalization, but people have already died as a result of prohibition, and continue to die as a result of alcohol consumption, slippery showers, guns, and the crushing weight of vending machines. It’s not likely to be a panacea. It’s not likely to be the end of the world.

Instead, the new law represents a chance to examine the source of our instinctive taboos. If we don’t take it, we run the risk of making poor social decisions, just like teenagers in cars smoking marijuana.