Mark Kleiman does the thankless job of explaining to us just how monumentally clueless both Maureen Dowd and Ann Althouse are about cannabis, its legalization and non-legalization, its effects, and its risks. One thing that might not otherwise have occurred to me (because I have a kind of visceral aversion to the overuse of the word ‘privilege’) is that Dowd openly admitted to committing a federal crime in a nationally-syndicated column. Yes, buying and ingesting a cannabis candy bar remains a federal crime. It’s not a felony, as Althouse would have it, but it’s still something that no normal person would announce they had done to the entire nation.
It really does demonstrate how the law only applies to some people. But it isn’t just Dowd’s privilege that allowed her to admit her crime without worry. It’s also a result of the fact that the federal government actually doesn’t have much interest in enforcing its laws against marijuana anymore. They still go after some growers and distributors but they don’t bother with mere users, and their heart is really no longer in the fight.
What Dowd’s self-inflicted hallucinatory bad trip did demonstrate contra Althouse is the danger of having cannabis candy bars that any kid (or clueless adult) can pick up and ingest without knowing the danger. So, if we’re going to have these products, we need sensible consumer protections to go along with them.
Also contra Althouse, we do inform people of the dosage of alcohol by requiring that the volume and alcohol content is displayed on the labels of alcoholic drinks. One of the reasons heroin is dangerous is because, unlike prescription painkillers, the dosage of any given bundle of heroin is generally unknown to the user. Prescription opioids kill four times as many people as heroin, but that’s because more people use pills and opioids kill in all forms. But at least an Oxy-Contin addict knows how much of the drug they are taking. And they also know that their pill isn’t laced with unknown and potentially fatal substances.
This whole episode has just been sad.