Britain Gets Quietly Stoned
Crusty ol' England relaxes its pot laws, and America looks even more embarrassed and backwards
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, July 12, 2002
Oh dear boy. Like we need more proof positive that the world is going straight to Hell.
Or at least to Heck (which is rumored to be just outside Dallas), or Purgatory or somewhere similarly warm like maybe Bali or Hawaii, or perhaps just to the park to lie down in the grass and look at the stars and feel all warm and mellow and horny and buzzed and relaxed and hey pass the pretzels.
Because here is why. Because here is the British government, staunchly starched and stiff-upper-lipped and cup-of-tea and all that, Tony Blair crying himself to sleep at night dreaming of the Clinton years, suddenly and without warning, relaxing the nation's pot laws.
Oh the hand-wringing. Oh the furrowed brows. Oh the screaming and the fainting. Oh the completely no-big-deal of it all.
Yes, here is the U.K., joining the rest of modern Europe by coming right out and declaring how their police will no longer arrest anyone for lighting up a spliff out in the open, won't waste all that time and all those resources and moneys on busting casual potheads for no reason. Heathens! Hedonists! Or, you know, not.
No more criminalization of pot smoking and no more arresting giggly stoned club kids and no more inane pretense that pot is somehow any worse than antidepressants or steroids or the roughly 18 gazillion gallons of booze inhaled like air by the nation every single day except Sunday, because that's God's day to detox the liver. Incredible.
It's casually dramatic legislation that merely serves to illumine America's current and rather ridiculous stances on recreational drugs and pot use, with even the handful of states in the union whose voters have declared medical marijuana OK and useful, facing rigid whining and snarling from the U.S. government and the DEA and John Ashcroft.
Lest you think we are so progressive and enlightened. Lest you blindly buy in to the uber-patriotic hype that America is somehow more advanced and aware and culturally attuned that the rest of the world, permissive and free and tolerant and standard-setting. Lest you believe we are, at the very least, more open and thoughtful than those famously uptight Brits. Wrong.
Because now here are London teens, just like the rest of their European brethren, lighting joints right outside police stations.
Here is the youth culture, also dropping casual amounts of Ecstasy in clubs without fear of absurd police tactics and draconian zero-tolerance laws that cost millions and hurt innocent people and solve nothing.
The U.K. is not, by the way, claiming drugs are safe. They aren't saying drugs can't be dangerous if abused. They are simply acknowledging that casual pot use is of such minor import and of such negligible threat to the social fabric, punishing people for its use is about as successful as trying to discourage a Mormon from masturbating.
We inch painfully along, America does. We are often dragged, kicking and puling, into the future, despite ourselves, despite our leaders, despite our laws.
From RU-486 to MDMA to marijuana, we remain constantly embarrassed and shown the cuckold on the international stage, year in and year out. Oh you Americans. So cute and hypocritical and two-faced, the highest rate of casual drug use in the world and the most highly sexualized pop culture, and there you are, some poor teenage kid still going to jail for a decade for a first pot offense in Utah while Dad gets drunk again and beats his wife and shoots the dog.
Going so far as to equate, on national television, casual drug use with supporting terrorism. Thanks Geedubya. Nice way to alienate the culture even further, insult the intelligence of an entire nation.
Pot use has remained nearly constant for decades. Ecstasy use has roughly doubled in the U.S. in the past few years, cocaine is to Miami what beer is to Milwaukee (to quote Rolling Stone). Club drugs are more rampant and easier to obtain than ever.
Everyone knows this and everyone winks in the club bathrooms as the CDC and DEA and FBI issue false scare-tactic warnings and the youth just shrug and shake their heads and dance on, fully aware that the government, as usual, is spewing lies and misinfo and has no real idea what it's talking about, and that the famed War on Drugs is a staggering multibillion-dollar failure.
But there are signs of progress. There are, for example, small but increasingly respected groups that are now trying to promote safe club-drug use and prevent overdoses and lethal drug mixing, as opposed to thuggish police crackdowns and screeching threats and brutal policies that serve no one and do nothing to address the problem.
And even the FDA has recently and very tentatively approved new research into MDMA's usefulness in treating psychological disorders and depression, which by the way is exactly what it was so highly acclaimed for back in the late '60s, before the DEA got all panicky. Just FYI.
And now there is the U.K., making a highly visible mockery of U.S. drug laws, getting it at least a little bit right, re-aiming their resources toward education and protection and health instead of misinformation and alienation and castigation. Imagine. We don't say it often, but in this case it holds true: What a shame we can't be more like England.
After all, which would you rather have, 28 million Americans casually smoking a joint now and then to relax and de-stress and be able to watch the news without screaming and hurling sharp objects at Connie Chung's bizarrely shellacked head, or those same 28 million addicted to hardcore synthetic chemicals in Prozac and Xanax and Zoloft, with creepy polymerized smiles and a slight twitchy spasm in the left eye? You make the call. |
