The White House’s Head-Scratching Defense of Pot Prohibition

Did you know that the Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ONDCP) issued an
official response to Sunday’s New York
Times editorial urging
Congress to repeal the federal ban on marijuana? You did not miss
much. The ONDCP says marijuana must remain illegal because
“marijuana is addictive,” because “drugged driving is a threat
to our roadways,” because “marijuana use affects the
developing brain,” and because “substance use in school age
children has a detrimental effect on their academic achievement.”
Washington Post blogger Christopher Ingraham
judges this response “surprisingly weak,” noting that “it’s
built on half-truths and radically decontextualized facts.”
NORML’s Paul Armentano
calls it “utterly pathetic,” while New York Times
editorial writer David Firestone
points out that the ONDCP is statutorily obligated to oppose
legalization, regardless of the facts. That provision applies only
to Schedule I drugs, so one benefit of moving
marijuana to a less restrictive category might be smarter, more
nuanced arguments from the beleaguered pot prohibitionists at the
ONDCP—a possibility they are not allowed to discuss.

Or maybe this is about as smart as the case for prohibition
gets. The ONDCP statement exhibits two classic flaws of
prohibitionist arguments: 1) the failure to justify the legal
distinction between alcohol and other drugs, and 2) the failure to
justify (or even acknowledge) the use of force to stop people from
consuming psychoactive substances that politicians do not like. As
Ingraham notes, all of the administration’s concerns about
marijuana apply with equal or greater force to alcohol, which
President Obama himself
admits is more dangerous than marijuana. If these concerns do
not justify the prohibition of alcohol, how can they justify the
prohibition of marijuana?

As usual, the White House glosses over what that policy
means in practice. “The Obama Administration approaches substance
use as a public health issue,” the ONDCP says, “not merely a
criminal justice problem.” But no amount of quasi-medical rhetoric
can make up for the violence inherent in this system.
As long as the government tries to forcibly prevent
consensual transactions, it will be locking
people up (and occasionally killing
them) for things that should not be crimes.

“We agree that the criminal justice system is in need of
reform and that disproportionality exists throughout the system,”
the ONDCP says. “However, marijuana legalization is not the silver
bullet solution to the issue.” For the record,
the ONDCP also
rejects the idea that legalization is a “panacea.” The
ONDCP is right on both counts: Marijuana legalization is neither a
silver bullet nor a panacea. It nevertheless would be better than
prohibition, which is the issue I thought we were
discussing.