David Brooks used to be a stoner, but he thinks that the laws he was breaking did no more than subtly encourage him to be more temperate, more prudent, and more self-governing. I think he forgot about the criminal penalties involved.

…Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.

What about the moral ecology of arresting black kids for smoking weed and letting nice Jewish kids like David Brooks off with a warning? Back in June, the ACLU released a comprehensive report (.pdf) on the racial disparities in marijuana penalties.

The report also finds that, on average, a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates. Such racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests exist in all regions of the country, in counties large and small, urban and rural, wealthy and poor, and with large and small Black populations. Indeed, in over 96% of counties with more than 30,000 people in which at least 2% of the residents are Black, Blacks are arrested at higher rates than whites for marijuana possession.

Is that the kind of moral ecology we want? What kind of community do these laws nurture, David?

Since Mr. Brooks grew up in New York, let’s examine how subtle the drug laws were for the people who were actually, you know, arrested for selling marijuana to kids like David.

Under the Rockefeller drug laws, the penalty for selling two ounces (57 g) or more of heroin, morphine, “raw or prepared opium,” cocaine, or cannabis or possessing four ounces (113 g) or more of the same substances, was a minimum of 15 years to life in prison, and a maximum of 25 years to life in prison.

Yeah, even possessing four ounces of Mary Jane in the 1970’s of David Brooks’ hormonal blossoming could land you in Sing Sing for 15 to life. But this was not too likely to happen to you if you were a nice Jewish boy with an acceptance letter to the University of Chicago in your back pocket. And, in any case, little David finished his preparatory schooling the public way, at Radnor High in the Blue-Blooded Main Line Philly suburbs.

But we were talking about New York, and culture, and drug laws, and subtly sending messages through drug laws for the edification and refinement of the culture, and being “the sort of person most of us want to be.”

On that:

Between 1997 and 2007, [NYC] police arrested and jailed about 205,000 blacks, 122,000 Latinos and 59,000 whites for possessing small amounts of marijuana. Blacks accounted for about 52 percent of the arrests, though they represented only 26 percent of the city’s population over that time span. Latinos accounted for 31 percent of the arrests but 27 percent of the population. Whites represented only 15 percent of those arrested, despite comprising 35 percent of the population.

Government surveys of high school seniors and young adults 18 to 25 consistently show that young whites use marijuana more often than young blacks and Latinos. The arrests also are heavily skewed by gender. About 91 percent of people arrested were male.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “The NYPD routinely targets young men based on their skin color and where they live. Arresting and jailing thousands for marijuana possession does not create safer streets. It only fosters distrust between the police and community and strips hundreds of thousands of young New Yorkers of their dignity.”

The arrests, which cost taxpayers up to $90 million a year, are indicative of the NYPD’s broken windows approach to law enforcement, in which police focus on minor offenses as a method of reducing crime. This approach, also called quality of life policing, has caused a dramatic spike in stop-and-frisk encounters between police and city residents.

When David Brooks was a pimply-faced teen, he and his friends smoked pot which resulted in, as Brooks put it, “moments of uninhibited frolic” that deepened their friendships.

We can all relate.

But if Brooks had seen the inside of the walls at Sing Sing back then, he’d be singing a different tune today.