Obama Worries About the Gateway Effect of Marijuana Legalization

In
his
comments about marijuana legalization to The New
Yorker‘s David Remnick, President Obama draws a line between
pot and “harder drugs”:

When it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is
profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start
getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is
fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up
with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more
harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve
got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or
rot your teeth, are we OK with that?

It depends what you mean by “we.” I am OK with that, and so is
anyone else who believes people have a fundamental right to control
their own bodies, but polling data suggest most Americans are
not—possibly because they, like Obama, accept many
scary myths about “harder drugs,” such as the idea that
methamphetamine makes your teeth rot. What would a “finely
calibrated dose of meth” look like? Possibly like this. Obama seems
unaware that stimulants considered so dangerous that legalizing
them is unthinkable are widely prescribed to schoolchildren.

Remnick calls the possibility of broader drug legalizatiion,
resulting from consistent application of libertarian principle, a
“slippery-slope argument” against repealing pot prohibition.
Libertarians, who often warn that the precedent of one government
intervention will lead to additional, more ambitious interventions
down the road, are used to a different sort of slippery slope, one
that leads to tyranny. In Remnick’s nightmares (and possibly
Obama’s as well), it is freedom that lies at the bottom of the
slippery slope.