Potheads dreaming of freedom

Wow, so many things to blog about, so little time. It has not been a good week for blog-writing. But it is always a good week for blog-reading :-) (I am pretty much hopelessly addicted. That happened during a several-month stretch on a project where there was just not much work to do. And once you're hooked, you just can't let go even when you get busy again. Thank goodness playing solitaire at work is a level of shame I just can't go to--not that I'm knocking anybody who plays the occasional game, I'm just saying I might never get anything done at all.)

I read blogs during the day when I'm supposed to be working, and I catch a little NPR on my way to and from work (depending on the time of day, I get some cross-section of the day's news). We don't subscribe to any newspapers, and I generally don't watch any TV news. I know that there are stories that get a lot of play in the blogosphere that essentially don't exist in what is called the mainstream media, and in fact, you could say they get a lot of play in some corner of the blogosphere. There are lots of blogospheric bombshells I never hear of or only hear in the far distance, and then there are those stories that get a lot of traction in the corners where I am reading.

So recently there was some attention being paid to the fact that Jim Webb introduced legislation to reform the prison system. This was seen as a pretty brave thing for anyone to do, not to mention a freshman Democrat who did not win his seat by much of a margin. And there was general amazement that there seems to be, at least initially, some bipartisan agreement that this is an idea whose time might have arrived, and perhaps really could be addressed. (I'm all for it, go Jim.)

There was also some attention paid to a question posed to President Obama at the first on-line news conference, a question that got asked by virtue of the fact that anyone could submit a question, and everyone could vote on which questions would be asked, and this was one of the top vote-getters. One could certainly argue that the on-line audience might not have quite the same demographics as the country at large, especially when it comes to people paying attention to questions to be asked at an on-line news conference. At any rate, the question was about legalization of marijuana, and the President sort of laughed off the question and said we should not legalize marijuana (or, more particularly, that we should not legalize it to help the economy). In some quarters, the tone of the President's answer disappointed some people, even if they were not surprised by the content of his answer.

Let me stop for a moment to say that I am a big fan of Andrew Sullivan. There are a number of blogs I look at fairly regularly, but Andrew is far and away my favorite. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, he blogs constantly. He puts up lots of small items all through the day, so you can check back over and over and usually find something new. Another major reason is that his blog entries cover a wide range of subjects. He does have certain issues he gets particularly exercised about and they take up a fair bit of real estate, but he puts up pictures he finds interesting, artwork, videos, links to odd things on the net that are funny--there's quite a variety. He's got a goodly number of running items--a whole slate of "awards" (he categorizes some of the quotes he puts up by comparing them to known personalities), the daily Mental Health Break, The View From Your Window by which we get little glimpses of places all around the world where readers are living, and lately The View From Your Recession which is stories people email in to him about how the recession is affecting them.

He also has a rather unusual point of view. He is politically conservative but broke with the Bush administration over how the war in Iraq was prosecuted and the Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib/torture business, he's Catholic, gay, and HIV positive (and recently, married). He hails originally from England but has lived in the US for some time. He likes to blog about politics (whither the conservative movement, torture, Sarah Palin, etc), foreign policy, religion, gay issues, Catholicism, The Pet Shop Boys and 80's dance music generally, and the TV show South Park and its creators, among other things. It has also been pretty evident, given his libertarian leanings, that he is pretty tolerant of folks using pot.

(One other feature of Andrew's blog is that there are no comments. You can email him, and he and his staff read all his email, and he often posts emails from readers. But you can't go and read all the unadulterated input yourself.)

So Andrew had some post about the "war on drugs" and usage of marijuana, and maybe a couple of followups, and he has since been posting emails sent in to him by readers. (Several of the posts are accompanied by photos of strange botanical formations I would never recognize as having anything to do with pot, I feel very out-of-the-loop.) People are almost dying to "come out of the closet" about their pot use, although some have been more negative remarks about their experiences and why they stopped using or don't use. I guess I always knew that there are a lot of drug users in the U.S., but I never really thought about just how large a segment of the population we're talking about here.

So the week started out with statistics about the huge increase in our prison population, how incredibly biased it is towards minorities and the poor, and how much of it is the result of our drug laws and law enforcement policies. On one side there's this horrific impact on certain segments of the citzenry in terms of arrest, rap sheets, and prison, and on the other side, there's this large contingent of people who just want to relax at home with some weed and resent having to keep it from their employer, their kids, their wife, whatever. Here's a sample:

These reader emails really hit a chord with me. I too am a member of the closet. My husband and I often muse, while smoking pot, that the only thing we are doing wrong is breaking the law. If that is the only wrong you are committing it seems clear that it's not your behavior that needs to be re-evaluated, but the law itself. I have been slowly coming out of the pot closet over the past few years and it has been a nice surprise to see how many people give that knowing little smile and say, "me too".

You read these emails and wonder, how exactly do people get the stuff? Where do they go, who do they buy it from? How can you smoke your pot and read these stories of prisons with four times as many people in them as they're built for--do you feel any sense of responsibility for that at all? Does a person make any connection between their Friday night habit and people being killed in Mexico by gangs? Why are we taking one percentage of the population and persecuting them for selling drugs to an even larger percentage of the population that we completely leave alone? I know I'm sounding really judgmental, and that's not my intent--I just wonder at the detachment, the cognative dissonance--I find that pretty striking. Maybe I shouldn't, I suppose we all do it when you think of our relative wealth compared to poorer nations.