by Dominic Corva, Executive Director
I’m deeply unsatisfied with the ways we talk about cannabis legalization right now. Policymakers talk about it as a technical problem, opponents talk about it as a social threat, proponents talk about it as an end goal in itself, businesspeople talk about it as a financial gold rush, progressives talk about it as a social justice fix, and public health officials talk about it as a health risk, to name a few ways of talking about it that strike me as serving particular agendas that are different from mine.
I want to talk about legalization as a social problem. Not because legalization as a general idea is a social problem, but because the way we are doing legalization isn’t making a clean break from prohibition. And prohibition has always been a really big social problem. This is why I want to talk about postprohibition: legalization with, not after, prohibition.
This makes things difficult, because I don’t think we really understand prohibition very well. This applies across the spectrum, including people who fight against prohibition as well as neo-Prohibitionists.
I think we understand prohibition as a legal problem pretty well, but not as a cultural problem. Laws reflect and institutionalize cultural values about what, and who, must be controlled by the State’s monopoly on violence in society.
The authority of the State to use that monopoly against people who use the wrong drugs the wrong way, in a liberal democracy, requires a fairly liberal tolerance of authoritarian attitudes throughout the population: a willingness to conduct war without end.
So to me, prohibition is one expression of authoritarian culture in a “free” society. It’s politics as the extension of war by other means. I’m not big on war, and I certainly object to the open-ended militarization of society against elements of its own population that aren’t hurting anyone else because they grow, distribute, or consume a plant.
I like plants. I think they teach us a lot about being a part of a living ecosystem, especially if we co-exist with them in ways that are more than commodified.
So if our current round of “experiments in democracy” that we call legalization are hamstrung by cultural attitudes about how dangerous a plant is; and how deferential we need to be towards still-actually-existing Federal Prohibition laws despite their really obviously political, rather than scientific, origins; then I have a problem with what legalization means and therefore how we talk about it.
There are many many ways to disagree with me about my problems with legalization that are really problems with democratic authoritarianism. But the demonstrably correct observation that new State and local legal frameworks exist alongside and in tension with National, Global, State, and Local cannabis prohibitions isn’t one of them.
So let’s start there, with the empirical fact that we are dealing with a complex legal landscape with conflicting and/or badly aligned elements. This observation does not lead necessarily to agreeing with my cultural analysis of postprohibition, but it does establish a common sense ground for talking about cannabis legalization beyond whether it’s good or evil.