Legalize pot for adults, but...

It doesn't matter whether pot harms users or not--or even whether it harms friends of users or not. Speaking as someone raised by chain-smoking drunks, our society is morally obligated to either ban alcohol or allow pot.

I use neither, nor does my spouse, so I gain nothing personally from either choice.

But by choosing to make the lesser evil illegal and the greater one legal, society practices a terrible hypocrisy that fosters disrespect for the law and for society.

The argument that one is bad enough, we don't need two, is pure sophistry. Society rests on being fair--one law for everyone. When the legal drug is the one used by legislators and judges, and the banned one is the one used by "those people" the pretense of fairness goes out the window.

It's true that alcohol used in moderation is not dangerous. But that's equally true of pot (especially when it's eaten, not smoked).

If we legalize pot for adults, more people will use it than before--but most won't. It's not physically addictive, unlike alcohol. And most Americans don't want to wander around in a daze.

As for driving while stoned--I regard it the same way as I regard driving while drunk: premeditated attempted murder.

So legalize pot but treat as premeditated all crimes committed under the influence of any mind-altering substance that was voluntarily ingested.

That should make the law and order types happy. But if you don't support legalizing both or banning both you aren't serious about law and order.

Pot won't be legalized because of my wife

Pot won't be legalized because of my wife. She has a 140 IQ and is a pragmatic business manager--and a veteran scuba diver, so it's not like she's some stick in the mud.

But she's also a devout churchgoing Republican who has never had a cigarette or an alcoholic drink in her life (nor even a cup of coffee), much less marijuana or its ilk.

She opposes legalization of all drugs including marijuana--so firmly that she won't even discuss the topic with me.

And that's why none of the arguments raised by marijuana legalization advocates matter much. The prison-law enforcement industry has succeeded in making marijuana legalization a tribal issue.

"They" want to smoke pot. "They" aren't like you and me. "They" are bums, hippies, anarchists, people with bits of metal on their faces and tattoos on their necks and elsewhere. "They" threaten to overwhelm Society in a flood of boundary-less behavior. "They" are Dionysian. "We" are Apollonian.

None of this is openly articulated, mind you. But I think multiple generations of conservatives are still recoiling in horror at the Summer of Love and all the hijinks that flowed from it.

Unlike so many Republicans who oppose pot but drink liquor, my wife is not a hypocrite. She opposes all mind-altering substances (except chocolate). So I can't even accuse her of having a double standard.

But nobody reading comment threads on marijuana legalization should underestimate the power of tribal thinking, and the efficacy of the prison-law enforcement industry at invoking it. It's not the bogus rationales they offer up that are doing the trick. It's really this less-public but more effective campaign that has worked.

And because the real campaign doesn't use PowerPoint presentations and public debates to achieve its goals, it's harder to refute it or even claim that such a campaign is going on. It's like the way things were in the South after segregation was outlawed. Redneck politicians wouldn't say "Vote for me and I'll keep

the N_____s down." They'd just say "Y'all know what ah stand for."

That's what we're up against. Any suggestions?

I do have one, though I haven't gotten much traction with it yet: decriminalize marijuana (which would still make advertising it illegal ), but treat all crimes as premeditated if they were committed under the influence of a mind-altering substance (including alcohol) that was taken voluntarily by an adult. So a drunk driver mows down someone in a crosswalk--that's Murder One.

But I still don't know how to overcome the tribalism that this debate has gotten imbued with.