Proportions

A good piece in the Atlantic and another one in Slate. I have to admit that I've been distracted by it too, but just as the legalization story is bigger than the election, it's bigger than the Petraeus affair as well.

It's often said that the War on Drugs is irrational. But a policy should not really be assessed in terms of its rationality per se. Such assessments merely grant the policy its purported goal, rather than exposing its real motive. The Drug War is, first and foremost, malevolent. It's aim is to oppress, and it achieves this aim very well. There's nothing irrational about it.

As a policy for dealing with "the drug problem", of course, it's complete madness. But that problem is itself an ideological construct, a lie.

What is needed now is a long conversation among executives and lawmakers, taken at the highest level. We now have two states whose representatives must represent the idea that pot should be legal. This means that research that shows it is relatively harmless must be considered in a different way, i.e., taken seriously. This is where America shows us whether or not it really is a democracy, whether or not policy is made as an expression of the will of the people or the entrenched interests of enforcement agencies.