By Their Rules Shall Ye Know Them

 

Man is the tool-making animal, and that distinguishes mankind from all others, anthropologist said.

 

But then birds and primates and other critters were observed using tools, letting the gas out of that scientific bag. Here’s a different idea:

 

Man is the rule-making animal. An absolute desire to regulate someone else’s conduct distinguishes mankind from all other animals.

 

Animals may fight for territory, status or to protect their young, but not because one animal likes to eat rabbits while the other prefers squirrels and insists eating rabbit is a sin. Nor would one who ate tobacco try to keep another from eating marijuana.

 

Forbidden fruit and immoral conduct are human inventions. Animals wouldn’t be so dumb. Prohibition forbade almost all alcoholic beverages in the United States for 13 years beginning in 1920 because drinking alcohol was morally wrong.

 

But Prohibition’s chief moral accomplishment was creating a bonanza for organized crime. The mob clearly and profitably understood every rule maker’s core assumption—rules are needed to guide  other people. Or as gangster Al Capone observed “When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality.” 

 

The rule-making impulse is what drives our current prohibition of recreational drugs, particularly marijuana. Many a glass of good – and highly taxed --  booze has been raised in a haze of tobacco  smoke as elders sagely agree to keep others from abusing their bodies with dangerous and addictive stuff.

 

Now the issue of legalizing drugs, especially marijuana, is gaining some momentum, with polls consistently showing around half of the public is ready to consider the idea. The impetus isn’t a sudden groundswell of Live-and-Let-Live libertarian thought.

 

Governments zapped by the recession are looking for cash, and citizens are becoming uncomfortable with daily corpses sprouting from drug gang wars.

 

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose cash-starved state already makes $18 million from legalized medical marijuana, thinks it’s time to debate the issue. An estimated $1.3 billion in new state tax revenue from legalized pot may have whetted his debating appetite.

 

And don’t forget the money to be saved if we stop arresting folks for marijuana violations. FBI stats say there were more than 870,000 marijuana arrests in 2007, the last full-year records available. Besides the cost of arresting and prosecuting these folk, most under age 30, any conviction with prison time costs around $25,000 a year. Nationally, we spend about $1.3 billion a year on drug-offense prisoners. Heck, even a supervised probation conviction costs taxpayers between $3,000 and $4,000 yearly.

 

And spending all this money and effort has hardly reduced marijuana use. According to a 2006 Department of Justice report published last year, 14.8 million Americans had used marijuana in the past month. Law enforcement officers freed from chasing those citizens might have more time to spend preventing murder, theft, extortion, fraud and other American hobbies.

 

Still, opponents of legalization say we have a moral obligation to prevent folks from even experimenting with marijuana because of the horrible effect it will have on their lives, preventing them from reaching their fullest potential.

 

They can, after all, point to the last three U.S. presidents and rest their case.

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