Former President Donald Trump voiced his support for marijuana legalization on Sunday. In a post on Truth Social, the Republican candidate explicitly supported Florida’s legalization amendment. He also promised to “open up marijuana for medical use as a Schedule 3 drug” and supported leaving marijuana policy up to the states.
President Trump’s announcement follows previous comments that appeared to support Florida’s Third Amendment, mirroring his position on the issue in 2018. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has remained typically silent on the issue, though marijuana reform advocates who met with the vice president asserted in an op-ed Monday morning that he supports legalization.
Trump’s capitulation marks the first time a presidential candidate from either major party has endorsed liberalizing marijuana policy. There is a clear logic to the former president’s move: Why not abandon a position that is at odds with 70% of Americans?
But this political strategy, however clever, does not bode well for America. That both parties are now tempting voters with vices, not just marijuana, reflects the decadence of our self-governing republic.
Trump’s reason for supporting legalization — “ending unnecessary arrests and incarceration of adults for possessing small amounts of marijuana for personal use” — is similar to that of many Democrats, but that doesn’t make it fact-based: Very few people are jailed for marijuana possession, and while marijuana arrests have fallen since legalization, overall arrests have increased, reflecting police turning to other pretenses.
The real reason politicians support marijuana legalization is much simpler: people love marijuana and don’t like being told what to do. And in a democratic republic, this is a legitimately strong line of argument. A free society should have a rebuttable presumption that people may do what they like as long as it doesn’t harm others.
But for over a century, drugs and related vices such as gambling and pornography have defied that presumption because they are personally and socially harmful and, most importantly, addictive, and their use is so compulsive for some that it can be said to restrict the freedom of the user and thus merit the intervention of a freedom-loving government.
Marijuana checks all the boxes. It is personally harmful, being linked to lung cancer, heart disease, and schizophrenia. It is socially harmful, contributing to car crashes, workplace accidents, and unpleasant odors in public places. It is also addictive, with about a quarter of regular users meeting the clinical criteria for “cannabis use disorder,” characterized by continued use despite harm to self or others. Nearly half of users experience withdrawal symptoms.
The regulation of marijuana — banning its sale and prescriptions except in limited circumstances — flows from these facts. This same fact pattern justifies the regulation of other drugs and related vices. Why? Because addiction is tyranny, and a free, self-governing people cannot sustain a commerce in something addictive. The regulation of vices is a defining feature of self-government.
That was the thinking, anyway. Today, the virtue of temperance (meaning self-control, not necessarily abstinence) is increasingly being questioned. Instead, Americans believe that any indulgence in alcohol, whatever its vice, is okay.
As a result, business is booming: More than 17 million Americans now smoke marijuana daily or nearly daily; shady clinics advertise everything from testosterone to ketamine on social media, with few questions asked; OnlyFans performers earn more in a year than the entire NBA; and magic mushrooms can be purchased just a few blocks from the White House.
That’s why the new political consensus on marijuana is so important: it presupposes that you can win over voters with the promise of a liberalized vice, a political gain for which the key political gain is the ability to get high.
In some ways, it is not surprising that Donald Trump, the president of Playboy magazine and whose politics Ross Douthat once argued mirrored those of Hugh Hefner, would behave this way as a Republican politician. But even Trump has old-fashioned instincts that make him feel guilty. That’s why the criminal justice pretext is so important. No one wants to admit that the main purpose of legalization is to get votes by satisfying people’s baser urges.
But don’t be fooled: appealing to these impulses is exactly the purpose. It also leads us down an even more dangerous path. As politicians increasingly treat Americans as incapable of governing, the door to corrupt politics that exploits people’s passions for political gain opens wider. It’s hard to imagine how it can ever be closed again.
Photo: Jamie Grill/Tetra Images via Getty Images
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