Barry Eisler nailed it! This is the heart of what’s behind many of the rules, regulations and prohibitions in our society, but clearly those related to drugs, sex and other lifestyle preferences.

The inability to distinguish between subjective taste and objective principle is the very confusion that takes people from “I don’t like gay sex” to “gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry each other.”  Obviously, the tendency is powerful — so powerful it causes a collapse in logic and reason in otherwise presumably capable people, people who can feel so strongly about their own preferences that they manage to leap from “I don’t like X” to “which means X is objectively bad for society” to “and therefore the best and only way to address X is to make it a criminal act.”  None of these three things in any way follows logically from the others, but sometimes, when you really don’t like something, those three unrelated concepts can start to seem as ineluctably connected as a chain of ipso factos.

In dealing with policy makers and the public, this attitude is repeated in comments and decisions at all levels. A very clear example happened last year when Colorado State Senator Steve King said during Senate debates over regulating retail marijuana, “I don’t want to know about it, and I don’t want my kids to know about it.” When city councilmembers send aides to oppose applications for retail stores, including from a woman-owned medical marijuana store with an impeccable record, simply because “there are too many of these kinds of places,” that’s the worst kind of Reefer Madness.

via The Heart of the Matter: The Self-Stupifying Narcissism of the Anti-Pot Brigade.

Categories: Advocacy, Mental Health, Policy & Politics, War on Drugs

Tags: cannabis, Denver City Council, government, marijuana, reefer madness, war on drugs