Pot Prohibitionists Emphasize That Marijuana Is Mainstream and Respectable

On Saturday the pot prohibitionists at Project SAM took out a

full-page ad in The New York Times in
response to the paper’s recent
endorsement of marijuana legalization. See if you can figure
out the group’s message based on the illustration that dominates
the ad:

The message seems to be that pot is not just for potheads
anymore—that respectable, productive, mainstream people across
America (including the sort who wear suits to work) enjoy
marijuana. “As someone who has been working in the legalization
movement for over a decade to smash unhelpful stereotypes about who
uses marijuana,” says Marijuana Majority founder
Tom Angell, “I actually love this ad. The vast majority of people
who see it in the newspaper are going to think it’s a
pro-legalization ad making the point that not only hippies use
marijuana, but successful businesspeople do too.”

But judging from the text beneath the picture, that is not what
Project SAM is getting at. Rather, its point is that once marijuana
is legal, it will be sold not by some dude on the street but by
suit-clad men in offices. Scary, no?

Project SAM, whose strategy for propping up prohibition consists
mainly of inserting the word big in front of the word
marijuana, thinks it is. After all, people hate Big
Tobacco, so they will naturally flee in terror from the very notion
of Big Marijuana, another evil industry bent on selling a dried
psychoactive plant. That’s the idea, anyway. But for
antiprohibitionists, changing the marijuana business from a
criminal enterprise into a legitimate industry counts as an
advantage of legalization, not a drawback.

Among the reasons why that development should be welcomed (which
include lower prices, higher quality, and better selection) is that
the artificially high profits generated by prohibition tend to
enrich and empower people a bit scarier than the friendly-looking
pot dealer in the Project SAM ad. As the Drug Policy Alliance’s
Bill Piper observed in a
recent debate with Project SAM co-founder Kevin Sabet, “We
already have ‘Big Marijuana.’ They’re called drug cartels, and they
cut people’s heads off….Why let these thugs keep billions of
dollars a year if we don’t have to?”

Angell adds: “Most people who bother to read the text are going
to realize that legalization means that a professional, aboveground
industry will be taking control of the marijuana trade once we take
it out of the hands of the violent drug cartels and gangs that run
the show in the prohibition-created black market. I’m a little sad
that SAM didn’t ask Marijuana Majority to help fund the ad.”