Thinking More Clearly
A lot of the ratheads are well into their forties, or older. What do these people do for a living?
On a sparkling Sunday afternoon by Elliott Bay they came to Myrtle Edwards Park, about 150,000 strong over the weekend of August 18-19, to celebrate marijuana and call for its decriminalization. They wander among stalls and tents where paraphernalia and adornments are for sale: bongs and batiks, plus anemic-looking hemp nutrition bars and none-too-sturdy hemp-constructed sandals.
A fellow with a beard like Bluebeard the Pirate hawks a deluxe bong that operates on the vaporizer principle. Vaporizing about the virtues of hemp, he explains that “hemp seed lubricates your brain. It actually helps you think more clearly.” Right.
Marijuana's Main Effect
On the other hand, a woman peddling hemp cookies doesn't try to pump up pot or its devotees. “Yeah, I'm a loser,” she says cheerfully, apropos of what I'm not sure, “I don't care who knows it.” A guy shopping for little sterling-silver trinkets — rings and brooches embossed with the image of the cannabis plant — tells the merchant, “Yeah, I used to steal a lot of this kind of stuff to keep up my heroin habit. But I only stole from corporations.”
So you want to legalize recreational pot, huh? Of course plenty of folks who aren't losers or thieves smoke it. Seventy million Americans have tried dope. But something decriminalizers don't acknowledge when they compare the ravages of alcoholism to the more subtle damage done by long-term pot abuse is that marijuana's main effect when smoked in moderation is, so long as you're high, to make you stupid. A couple of drinks enliven conversation, but a couple of hits on a joint dramatically dull the mind, or make it giggle uncontrollably in movie theaters. They don't call it “dope” for nothing.
At Hempfest you won't hear anything about this, especially not at the booths set up to distribute pot propaganda. A guy from the 4th of July Hemp Coalition is lecturing a small group who don't look like they need to be convinced of the merits of marijuana. “The government is determined to believe that marijuana has no legitimate uses, and that no one who smokes marijuana has anything positive to contribute to society,” he says.
Maintaining the Status Quo
But Hempfest suggests that there is another reason for maintaining the status quo. Keeping pot behind shut doors may finally be a quality-of-life issue. As the matter stands, with pot-use half-heartedly policed, you can go about your business only very rarely encountering that oily sweet stink and the moronic gauze it throws across brains large and small. But legalize the stuff and it will be all around you: not just ratheads but all kinds of jokers getting high on the street, in bars, in parks. This isn't to say more people will smoke pot, but those who do will be in your face.
Hempfest is a fine advertisement for this fear, a fear that public-policy types rarely articulate but one that a lot of Americans feel, whether or not they themselves ever smoked pot. This may be why, for all the medical and juridical arguments offered by decriminalization advocates, legalized pot is going to be a very long time in coming if it comes at all.
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
