The United States government needs to legalize marijuana for recreational use, and they need to do so as soon as possible. For those of you who might have trouble reconciling this statement with my snippy and acerbic prose and overall non-mellow vibe, fear not – I donít own a single piece of tie-dyed clothing, I wouldnít recognize “Drum Space” if I heard it, I donít attend NORML meetings, and as of this writing you would find my armpits and legs smooth and clean- shaven. I donít suffer from glaucoma or from terminal cancer. I donít even smoke pot – anymore.

I used to smoke quite a bit of pot. A lot of people start toking in high school, probably because high school doesnít do a whole lot to hold the attention of the average American adolescent, but at my school they doled out more than enough homework to keep us busy, and since I always did all of my homework and didnít have enough social savvy to hide that fact, I didnít get invited to do bad things with the cool kids. In fact, my high-school self made Sandra Dee look like a cycle slut. Anyhow, the long years of dorking out paid off when I got into Princeton and discovered that, for the most part, if I exhibited a cursory knowledge of the English language and evidence of a heartbeat, I could earn some sort of a B. I still remember the first day of my required writing seminar, in which the preceptor called on this cute guy with bedhead, and Bedhead Boy calmly responded that he “hadnít gotten around to” doing the reading. At my high school, students regularly stayed up until three in the damn morning doing the reading, and a student who hadnít finished often burst into tears of shame when forced to admit in class that she had not in fact completed the two hundred pages of the Federalist Papers that the teacher had assigned, because she had had to read The Mill On The Floss in its entirety, study for an AP Spanish test, and complete twenty-five advanced algebra problems, all after two hours of field hockey practice and an hour on the phone with her chem lab partner, attempting in vain to figure out the molecular formula for guar gum, but despite having a legitimate reason not to have completed the assignment, a student at my school would never have DREAMED of commenting in such a blasÈ fashion that she “hadnít gotten around to” doing the reading because she, like the rest of us, lived in fear of not getting into “a good school,” so you can imagine the horror with which I awaited the preceptorís response to Bedhead Boy, and my delighted shock when the preceptor shrugged and said, “Well, all right, try to do it for next time.” Apparently, acquiring a college degree did not necessarily involve studying, or – as I learned later – regular attendance. This left me free to engage in more stimulating pursuits like drinking beer, kissing boys that treated me like crap, and learning to roll a joint.

So, during my college years, I inhaled more than my share of wacky tobacky. I didnít even like it that much, frankly. I mean, I didnít mind it, obviously, but on balance I would have preferred a frosty cold beer every time. Marijuana made me slow and sleepy. It made me stare at walls; it made me play with crayons for hours on end. But most of my friends got high on a regular basis, so I got high too. Yes, I wanted to fit in, but the people I hung out with didnít mind one way or the other if I smoked up with them – basically, I couldnít cope with the stoner behavior without getting stoned myself. Stoners spent twenty minutes looking for their shoes; stoners showed me Magic Eye books; stoners dissolved into helpless giggles when confronted with the delivery of a pizza that they had completely forgotten about, dude. Sober, I found this dizziness a little annoying, but stoned, I found it hilarious, so I took an if-you-canít-beat-ëem-join-ëem attitude and waited for the day when we could play quarters instead. Then, in a supreme irony considering how much pot I smoked (not much) compared to some of my cohorts (too much), I got arrested for possession, and after this experience I think you will excuse me for finding the governmentís policy on marijuana absurd.

This might sound like just so many sour grapes because I got caught, and Iíll allow that, up to a point. But what did we (I got arrested with two other people) do, exactly? Well, we sat down outside, got high, and went in search of a corn chip or two. We didnít sell, or try to sell, our stash to anyone, of any age. We didnít offer our stash to any passersby for free, either. We didnít get behind the wheel of a car while stoned. We didnít damage any property. We didnít assault, or attempt to assault, anyone. We didnít steal anything. When we got pinched, the campus police tried to talk the town police out of arresting us, but the town cops had none of that and proceeded to cuff us; they let me stand out on a main campus thoroughfare, with handcuffs on, while everyone I had ever known walked by. Despite the fact that I had just smoked a fatty and had clogs on, I apparently represented a threat to flee. Then they brought us downtown in two separate cars, with the sirens on and the lights flashing, and although I felt utterly terrified I started laughing, because the cops obviously thought they had made a bust comparable to that of John Dillinger, when in fact some old biddy had looked out her window and called them, but I refrained from pointing out that this arrest did not exactly cement my high opinion of their investigative prowess. Then they sat us down in a holding cell and took all of our vital information and searched our bags, and when they found my birth control pills, they sent them to the lab. In case you missed that, let me repeat: THEY SENT MY GODDAMN BIRTH CONTROL PILLS TO THE GODDAMN LAB. Um, excuse me, Officer Einstein, but can you please tell me the last time you saw any kind of ILLEGAL DRUG that came in a package of TWENTY-EIGHT CAPSULES marked with DAYS OF THE WEEK that said SYNTHETIC ESTROGEN on it? AS IF I go out to the playground and corrupt schoolchildren by whispering, “Pssst – hey, kid. You want some estradiol? Come on, youíll get a niiiice buzz, and a rack to boot”? Did your classes at the police academy not include learning to read?

Then they had to process us. Fortunately, it didnít take all day. Oh, no, wait – it did. The boys I got busted with sat in their cell and I sat in mine, longing for a metal cup to clang on the bars. The self-styled hard-ass in charge of our case, Detective Terraciano, took our mug shots and four sets of fingerprints, one at a time. Terraciano, a short and humorless individual, had a lot of trouble with these simple tasks, probably because he hadnít lucked into an actual arrest in quite some time despite fancying himself quite the law-enforcement mastermind. Terraciano also wasted a lot of time asking me utterly inappropriate and inadmissible questions about the “source” of the pot, questions he didnít ask the guys, apparently on the theory that he could get the broad to crack under pressure or some damn fool idea he got from a Jimmy Cagney movie, and I could scarcely refrain from shouting, “Youíll nevah get me, coppah – youíll nevah get me, see?” just to annoy him. Instead, I gave him snotty little answers like “north of here” and “this guy” which didnít help him at all, and finally he stared at me and said, “Thereís no need to be a bitch,” and I really wanted to say, “Listen, you self-important little dicksmack – I canít think of a better time to be a bitch to a deluded fat-ass suburban cop than when I have ALREADY GOTTEN ARRESTED,” but instead I just stared at him and said, “Exactly.” Finally, they turned us loose and we went straight to Burger King and ate dinner and sat shaking our heads in disbelief that someone had seen fit to waste this much time on something so insignificant.

A few months later, we went to court and got probation and a big old fine, mostly to pay for court costs, and who handed out the sentence but a judge who apparently had gotten pulled over a couple of times for driving under the influence. Okay, let me get this straight – you got behind the wheel of a motor vehicle after throwing back a few scotches, and you have the right to pass judgment on me? I donít think so. His Honor also whipped off his bifocals and stared me down and told me that I had made a big mistake and I had better not do it again, and I nodded while thinking to myself that the wrath of my parents made my day in court look like a paid vacation, mini-bar included. So all told, this cost me (or, rather, my father) six hundred dollars in fines and several hundred dollars in legal fees and completely turfed my relationship with my parents for months, and did I stop smoking pot as a result? No. I stopped later when I finally got bored enough with it, but immediately after my arrest I got stoned hourly as an act of pure defiance, and if you think that sounds stupid, listen to this. This guy in my class at college got pulled over for driving drunk – and I donít mean two or three beers, I mean blind drunk – no fewer than five times, and he never got arrested or lost his license. Another guy who grew up in the same part of New Jersey as I did hit and killed a Tulane campus police officer in his Jeep, left the scene, and didnít get any jail time. The system lets convicted child abusers out of jail after two or three years. Violent felons get paroled after serving barely a quarter of their time. Meanwhile, still another kid I know had a gun in his face and a foot on his neck, spent two hours in a paddy wagon, and spent another twelve hours in a holding cell, just for touching a dime bag. This makes zero sense no matter how you look at it.

Government propaganda and clever Partnership For A Drug-Free America ads to the contrary, marijuana does not affect the memory, and federally mandated science has failed to prove that it serves as a gateway drug. In fact, it relieves chronic pain, a benefit that anti-drug mavens mention grudgingly if they mention it at all, and I havenít heard of any studies linking marijuana to violence. Now, I no longer use marijuana because, frankly, it just puts me to sleep, but if other people want to use it, whether medicinally or recreationally, the government should let them. If the Feds want to lock up narcotics dealers, and dealers that sell to children, I donít have a problem with that – they can throw away the key if they want to, because the hard stuff messes people up mentally and physically, and kids shouldnít have exposure to drugs, period. But once a kid turns eighteen, if he can vote and serve in the Army and buy cigarettes, which will do him so much more harm than firing up the occasional bowl ever would, why canít he carry recreational amounts of marijuana? Prosecuting people for possession of marijuana wastes time and money far better spent on apprehending real criminals, or funding low-income rehab clinics, or education about drugs – and I donít mean the drugs-are-bad mantra I had to chant along with in school. I mean realistic descriptions of their effects and effective ways that kids can deal with drug use among their peers, so that kids can make informed decisions.

Letís face it – a bunch of old men in Washington think they missed something during the sixties and want to punish everyone else for having the fun they didnít, or they subscribe to some sort of knee-jerk Reefer Madness-inspired vision of the pot-smoking “lifestyle” that includes lava lamps and pathological laziness that they feel duty-bound to stamp out in keeping with this countryís Puritanical roots, so they lump all drugs together as “bad” and “an enemy of Americaís children,” but this misinformed rhetoric ignores two basic facts. First of all, anyone over the age of twenty-one can purchase cigarettes and alcohol in this country, and I like my cigarettes and my alcohol, but if you want to scapegoat someone as the enemy of Americaís children, you need look no farther than Old Granddad and Joe Camel. Second of all, they can outlaw marijuana if they want to. They can burn the crops, they can confiscate the plants, they can send Cheech and Chong and Bob Weir to Alcatraz and they can tell the National Guard to shoot into the crowd at Phish shows. But one way or another, kids will find a way to get high. They will smoke banana peels and sniff glue and do whip-its and chug bottles of NyQuil, and they will water down their parentsí liquor and they will pay adults to buy them butts at the 7-Eleven – if it gives them a buzz, no matter how brief or pathetic, kids will find it and kids will try it. The government might as well go ahead and make recreational amounts of marijuana legal, at least for adults, because banning it doesnít do a damn thing to stem its consumption, and compared to doing lines of White-Out, smoking the occasional doob after school seems downright tame, and frankly, if it prevents the youngsters from opening fire on their classmates, I fail to see the problem.

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