Pot Prohibitionist at CPAC Says He Is ‘Fighting Against the Tide’

Yesterday The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball
attended a debate about marijuana legalization at the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) and came away
convinced that critics of the war on drugs are ascendant within
the conservative movement. The debate pitted conservative blogger
and Fox News commentator Mary Katharine Ham against Christopher
Beach, a producer for former drug czar Bill Bennett’s radio show.
Ball reports that the discussion “turned out to be surprisingly
one-sided,” with the audience, or at least the most vocal parts of
it, overwhelmingly in favor of legalization, the position taken by
Ham. Ball acknowledges that CPAC skews young and libertarian, but
she says Beach told her he typically gets a hostile response when
he defends prohibition in the company of fellow conservatives.
“There used to be a strong conservative coalition opposed to drugs,
but it’s dissipated in the face of mounting public support for
legalization,” Beach say. “We’re fighting against the tide on
this.”

To longtime
opponents of the war on drugs, those are pretty startling words.
Back in the 1980s, when I started writing about drug prohibition,
Gallup
found that less than a quarter of Americans thought marijuana
should be legal. My own father wanted to know whether I really
believed what I was saying or was just in it for the money. I am
not sure which answer would have been worse from his perspective.
Eventually he decided that advocating drug legalization was a
respectable position, since it had attracted support from serious
people like Milton Friedman and Bill Buckley. Today he mails me
clippings about medical marijuana from Israeli newspapers.

My father, who will turn 89 this year, is part of “the only age
group that still opposes legalizing marijuana,” according to a

Gallup poll conducted last fall. Overall support for
legalization was 58 percent in that poll, and the breakdown by age
went like this:

18 to 29: 67 percent

30 to 49: 62 percent

50 to 64: 56 percent

65+: 45 percent

The results were similar in a CNN
poll conducted in January:

Two-thirds of those 18 to 34 said marijuana should be legal,
with 64% of those 34 to 49 in agreement.

Half of those 50 to 64 believe marijuana should be legal, but
that number dropped to 39% for those age 65 and older.

According to Gallup, only 35 percent of Republicans favor
marijuana legalization, meaning they are more inclined to support
pot prohibition than retirees are. As Ball observes, this situation
creates a dilemma for the Republican Party:

The situation closely parallels the party’s predicament on gay
marriage, which most Republicans still oppose even as widening
majorities of the broader public support it.

It adds up to a quandary for the GOP: Should it embrace the
unpopular position still disproportionately favored by its members
and risk marginalization as a result? Or will the burgeoning
conservative voices in favor of legalization win out? Simply put,
do Republicans want to be on the losing side of yet another culture
war?

It will be interesting to see how they answer that question. In
the meantime, I am trying to get used to the weird feeling of
swimming with the tide.