He's Not High: Inside Barney Frank's Plan to Legalize Marijuana
To my shame, I started my interview with Congressman Barney Frank about the legalization of marijuana by apologizing to my subject. "I know you guys have a lot on your plate these days, so I'm sorry to be calling you about something kind of trivial..."
Then I did a rapid midcourse correction. "But it's not trivial, because people go to jail over it."
"That's exactly right," Frank said.
We were talking about the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009, Frank's latest attempt to bring sanity to the federal marijuana laws. Currently, pot is classified as a Schedule I Controlled Dangerous Substance under federal law, which makes it worse than morphine, cocaine, amphetamine, and PCP. Possession of a single joint carries a penalty of $1,000 and a year in prison – a charge faced by about 800,000 American citizens every year. This is the government whose judgment on war and economics we are supposed to respect.
So I started the interview over.
ESQUIRE: Could you tell me why you're doing it at this time? Everybody says you guys have got so much to handle right now.
BARNEY FRANK: Announcing that the government should mind its own business on marijuana is really not that hard. There's not a lot of complexity here. We should stop treating people as criminals because they smoke marijuana. The problem is the political will.
ESQ: That's my second question. There's already been a lot of change in the country. Thirteen states have decriminalized pot. What's holding up Congress?
BF: This is a case where there's cultural lag on the part of my colleagues. If you ask them privately, they don't think it's a terrible thing. But they're afraid of being portrayed as soft on drugs. And by the way, the argument is, nobody ever gets arrested for it. But we have this outrageous case in New York where a cop jammed a baton up a guy's ass when he caught him smoking marijuana.
ESQ: You're kidding.
BF: Actually, I've just been corrected by my partner – it was a radio he jammed up the guy's ass, not his baton.
ESQ: Small radio, I hope.
BF: By the way, the bill is bi-partisan: I've got two Democrats and two Republicans.
ESQ: Who are the Republicans?
BF: Ron Paul. And Dana Rohrabacher from California.
ESQ: Isn't Rohrabacher pretty hard-right?
BF: He's a very conservative guy, but with a libertarian streak.
ESQ: That libertarian streak will help you out once in a while. And who's against it?
BF: Well, Mark Souder from Indiana, who's very much a proponent of the drug war.
ESQ: When you talk to Souder about it, what does he say?
BF: You don't waste your time on people with whom you completely disagree.
ESQ: Okay.
BF: Here's one thing I would say – there's a great intellectual flaw at work here. People say, "Oh, you want the government to approve of smoking marijuana." And the answer is, no, there should be a small number of things that the government makes illegal, but the great bulk of human activity ought to be none of the government's business. People can make their own choices.
ESQ: What about the "public-square" argument that we need to keep prostitutes off the streets and pot-smokers on the run in order to promote a higher level of morality and civic order?
BF: One, I don't think it's immoral to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, even though they may make you sick. Morality to me is the way you treat other people, not the way you treat yourself. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty makes a great deal of sense in that regard. I wish more people read him.
ESQ: My father forced me to read On Liberty when I was fourteen years old. I still haven't recovered.
BF: He deals very thoughtfully with some of the objections.
ESQ: Then let me ask you from the other side: Why is the bill so modest? You explicitly say you're not going to overturn state laws.
BF: Because I think it's important, when you're confronting political opinions this way, to make it easier for people. This isn't for drug dealers. Although I do think there's a logic that once you've allowed people to smoke, you're going to go beyond that.
ESQ: So how far do you really want to go? Decriminalize completely? Tax it, like they're talking about out in California?
BF: I don't think that's a debate I should get into right now.
ESQ: So you want to be a cautious centrist, waiting for the country to come around?
BF: [pause] You think this is centrist?
ESQ: [laughs] Okay, sorry.
BF: I must say, I don't have a lot of sympathy with people on the left who say, "Oh, I'm not going to settle for some small step, I'm going to take the big step." I'm doing something I think could be passable. I believe the results of modest beginnings will encourage people to go further. And if the people who disagree with me are right, it won't go further.
ESQ: Realistically, do you think it's going to pass?
BF: Not this year, no.
ESQ: How long do you think it will take?
BF: There's no point in my guessing. Why would I want to guess? We'll have a rational discussion, and we'll see where it goes from there.
While We're Here, One Final Hit on the Topic
Meanwhile, in the wacky world of Republicans who love liberty almost as much as they love prisons, an Illinois congressman named Mark Kirk has proposed a competing law to make selling "this new potent marijuana" punishable by $1 million in fines and 25 years in prison. Apparently Kirk is talking about something called "kush," which I cannot personally evaluate since I am A) not currently a pot-smoker, and B) too crippled by college bills to afford anything that costs $600 an ounce. But for those old-fashioned reality-based types who care about scientific evidence, here's what the guys in white lab coats say.
So, Which One Is Goliath Again?
Jane Hamsher of MSNBC and Jillian Brandes go toe-to-toe last week about health-care reform.
Speaking of reform, last week MSNBC reported the shocking statistic that health-care reformers have spent $15 million on ads, while the enemies of reform have spent a mere $4 million. "It's a David and Goliath situation," whined a right-wing shill named Jillian Bandes.
Well, there are statistics and there are statistics. Behind the scenes, where it really matters, hospitals, doctors, and Big Pharma are spending $1.4 million a day to kill reform. They've hired three-hundred-and-fifty former members of congress and congressional staffers as temporary lobbyists. "Even in a city where lobbying is a part of life, the scale of the effort has drawn attention," the Washington Post reports.
David and Goliath, indeed.
You Like Dislike Me, You Really Like Dislike Me!
Loving a vigorous debate and personal abuse as I do, I have come to rely on my many right-wing critics for my weekly dose of bile. So it was very exciting to open my Web browser yesterday and find myself attacked from the left! My crime was comparing the 19th-century abolitionist John Brown to the "right to life" assassin Scott Roeder. Also, lamenting the 620,000 people who died in the Civil War. According to historian Louis DiCario, that makes me a racist. "What Richardson actually seems to be asking is: "Was ending the enslavement of black people worth a half-million white people's lives?" And I was wrong to call Brown a terrorist too. Although he dragged a farmer and his sons from their beds and watched as his raiding party hacked them to death with swords, he was actually a "counter-terrorist." Check it out!
In DiCario's honor (and Barney Frank's and John Stuart Mill's and all the victims of righteous causes), here's the quote of the day: "There is in most of us an unreconstructed Southerner who will not accept domination as well as a benevolent despot who wants to mold others for their own good, to assemble them in such as way as to produce a comprehensive unit which will satisfy our own ambition by realizing some vision of our own; and the conflict between these two tendencies – which on a larger scale gave rise to the Civil War – may also break the harmony of families and cause a fissure in the individual." – Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.
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