Alex Berenson wrote a piece at NYT highlighting the arguments of his new book, and Malcolm Gladwell piggy-backed on it at the New Yorker. Berenson seems to think that marijuana causes psychosis, and that this is a reason to keep it illegal. (He favors "decriminalization" which eliminates criminal penalties on the users but not on the suppliers.) The response was swift and vicious. Some of the snarkier comments on this Twitter feed might give you a taste of how the discourse played out. You can also read some of the comments on his NYT piece. There is an exchange of ideas and information here, but the tone is one of shaming and derision. Berenson is accused of peddling "Reefer Madness". He's accused of not understanding the most widely repeated truth about social science: that "correlation isn't causation." Some are accusing him of not caring about large numbers of black men being sent to prison for drug charges, implying racial insensitivity in his priorities (if not outright accusing him of actual racism).
I don't care for this type of response, and I don't think it's a productive way to engage with the enemy. If the target of your argument is Berenson or someone who believes his claims, the best approach is to calmly, carefully explain why his claims are wrong. Don't just chant "Correlation isn't causation!", as if everybody doesn't already understand that. Show that careful controls make the correlation go away, or that an alternative causal mechanism is more plausible and explains away the correlation. For example, someone did an analysis with more thorough controls showing that Colorado and Washington have lower murder rates than expected based on prior trends. Read the piece in the link. I don't detect any sarcasm or rudeness, just a careful vetting of one of Berenson's claims. I would prefer our public discourse to be conducted like this.
On the other hand, I'm having this "I didn't want it this way, but I'll take it" kind of feeling. Drug prohibition is just a terribly wrong-headed policy. There is basically no justification for it, theoretical or empirical, that passes muster. Do any kind of sensible cost-benefit analysis, including in the analysis anything that a reasonable person might care about, and prohibition fails by a very wide margin. I'm reminded of a quote from Drugs: America's Holy War by Arthur Benavie. Describing his review of the literature, Benavie writes (emphasis in original):
The more I studied the issue, the more appalled I became. There were no benefits I could find, only costs.This was my experience after reading anything and everything I could find on drug policy. Nobody can plausibly claim that problematic drug use is significantly reduced by drug prohibition, which would be the one supposed benefit. (There are flippant attempts to make this claim, but they fail.) So there's basically nothing on the Benefits side of the ledger, and on the Costs side we have things like black market violence, infectious disease among IV drug users, overdose deaths due to uncertain drug purity, and pointless harassment of citizens (innocent and "guilty") by law enforcement. (If we're restricting the discussion to marijuana, I acknowledge that only the last thing on that list is really significant.) Some excellent books have been written about this: Drug War Crimes, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed, Smoke and Mirrors, Drug War Heresies, Ending the War on Drugs, Saying Yes, and the above mentioned Drugs: America's Holy War. Drug policy reformers have tried calmly and carefully to explain why this policy is a failure. Drug warriors have dug in their heels and refused to listen to common sense, and the general public is too apathetic to spend any time or effort revising its opinions. (Tellingly, Drug War Heresies declines to recommend outright legalization, but its authors are quick to point out that prohibition has nothing to recommend it! I read this as the authors trying to be neutral in a non-partisan sense, but hinting strongly that nobody would have any good reason to institute drug prohibition if it weren't already official government policy. It's sheer inertia, status quo bias at work.)
I hate internet shaming. But if this is how policy changes, so be it. I feel like the nice way has been tried, and the debate has been won, but nobody cared enough to actually tune in to watch it. I won't feel terribly sorry for the drug warriors who find themselves being shamed on social media for supporting backwards policies that have horrible consequences. In a few years, they will be regarded the same way that opponents of gay marriage are today. It would be lovely if policy changed resulted from civil discourse. People have a reasonable discussion, presenting and weighting or discounting various kinds of evidence, the participants adjust their priors based on new information, and we arrive at some kind of rational policy. I wish that was the world we lived in. And I tried my best. I really tried to be a gentleman about it. For my efforts, I feel like I actually reached a few people. But I have this nagging feeling that policy change doesn't arise from a process like this. To change attitudes in the general public, you have to make the "wrong" opinion seem backwards, uncool, and shame-worthy, like what happened to racism over the 20th century. (To take a more trivial example, Steven Pinker describes how dueling went out of favor in the 19th century in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. It wasn't so much that reasoned arguments against dueling gained a foothold, or that it was outlawed in more jurisdictions. Dueling declined and disappeared because the younger generation thought it was a barbaric, even laughable practice. Dueling became very uncool.)
Reasoned arguments reach a few disciplined thinkers, but most people are not terribly thoughtful. Most people don't hold up their beliefs for examination; they are too tribal or too lazy or simply too busy worrying about other things. (I really think most people are just sleep-walking with respect their opinions and beliefs. They often don't even have well-formulated opinions.) To get the necessary critical mass of popular support, maybe shaming and other kinds of dirty-fighting are necessary. I've said this before. There is a role for calm, rational debate. But maybe there's also a role for assuming the moral high ground and publicly shaming your enemies. Claiming "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." and then listing the sins of the king: this is not the stance of someone who's ready to sit down for a nice chat. Words like those are a commitment strategy. It's saying, "I'm done talking. I tried that, and it didn't work. Now it's time to get some shit done."
(Of course this strategy is risky. At least half the time, the person who is dripping with moral rectitude is in the wrong. Adopting this "I'm not moving" stance just confirms to everyone else that they're a thick-headed idiot. It's a means of getting your way, but it does nothing to ensure you're actually in the right.)
Like I said, I don't care for this. But if I'm being totally honest here, I do see support for drug prohibition as a moral failing. Someone is advocating the use of violence to stop something without giving a very good reason for it. Drug warriors aren't simply saying they disapprove of something. They want to use state power to actively suppress it. They are approving the use of armed men, sometimes sporting military-grade weapons and armor, to suppress mutually agreed-upon, voluntary transactions. Some grant this support in a thoughtless, implicit way; they simply don't think about how some people will be non-compliant and make themselves the targets of state violence. Some are much more explicit about supporting theses extremely violent tactics. I think it takes a pretty serious case of moral blindness to support this kind of thing, and it really is shameful. I think about all the innocent people subjected to extremely violent raids of their residences to serve drug warrants. Some of these innocent people are the children or spouses of actual drug dealers, so from the point of view of the state this kind of raid isn't even a mistake! Targeting innocent people is done on purpose in these cases. I think about the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who have had their lives turned upside down by the legal system. Some spend multiple decades in prison. Some never see the inside of a prison, but nonetheless go through a terrifying legal ordeal. This is evil in plain sight. I'm flummoxed by the unrepentant drug warriors who actually participate in this: the police officers who actually serve drug warrants and conduct no-knock raids, the prosecutors who actually build cases and bring charges against dealers, even the milder case of a cop at a traffic stop who calmly talks a scared kid into waiving his 4th amendment rights and busts him for pot possession. It reminds me of the East German Stasi (the agents and the sniveling informants who served them) who spied on their fellow countrymen and ratted them out for political crimes. I don't understand how someone can so thoroughly betray their fellow citizens, unless they have been deeply morally compromised. If policy change comes about because drug warriors are finally getting the public shaming they deserve, I guess I'm okay with that. I feel I did my honest best to bring this around the right way. Sorry if it's coming to this.
I acknowledge that I am arguing for more than just marijuana legalization; I think the arguments for legalizing marijuana apply to other drugs, too. And I think the arguments for criminalizing those drugs are just as lame. This puts me in the minority for now, but stay tuned. Attitudes are shifting, and people are growing wise to the failures of prohibition in general.
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Is it weird for something that's still widely supported and still official government policy to be outside the Overton Window? Not really. I'd say that was the status of gay marriage very recently, when it was widely supported but still not officially legal in all states. Oh, there were still opponents, but they quickly learned that they couldn't discuss their opinions without being shamed and shouted down.
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