Now is the time.

I’ve been almost stewing in fury at this Phelps story, unable to compose myself and put virtual pen to e-paper. Thankfully, Radley Balko summed up my thoughts for me, and I post his entire piece here, since it really needs to be read:

A Letter I’d Like To See (But Won’t)

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.

Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have have without a shred of evidence beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.

You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.

Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.

Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.

Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen . . . is also a proud pot smoker.

Yours,

Michael Phelps

Letting this story simply die is not enough. Now, more than ever, organizations and individuals who care deeply about individual liberty and rational policy-making need to make themselves loud and clear. The last three presidents have all admitted, in coy political fashion, to using the drug. Arguably the nation’s top athlete currently uses the substance. The man who is singularly responsible for one the world’s most powerful computing companies, Apple, has described his LSD use as “one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life.”

The charade continues, as it appears that the police plan on pursuing the case. I can’t get to mad about the police, because it’s easy to divine his motives: more press coverage means more funds from the city and state government, as well as federal funding from the DEA, if he plays his cards right (thanks, veep!). What is infuriating are the governmental incentives that allow for this sort of nannying to be condoned and rewarded with grant money.

Now, more than ever, NORML et al must get serious. Buy some national ad time, and expose this idiocy for what it is.

H.L. Mencken, taking advantage of the repeal of Prohibition

For those of you who aren’t booze/liberty hounds, today marks the 75th anniversary of the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which made the sale of alcohol illegal. In a delightfully ironic twist, it was the state of Utah (yes, that Utah) that turned the tide in favor of liberty and common-sense.

It might seem weird to imagine a world where alcohol was banned, but not if you set your mind to it. For those of us still under 21, drinking culture is no different than it was during the “Progressive” Era. Or look at the War on Drugs, particularly marijuana, where an entire black market has developed within and beyond the purview of the government, where billions of dollars are wasted fighting the “menace.”

H.L. Mencken, that great saint of journalists, critics, and skeptics everywhere, wrote about Prohibition in 1925:

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favourite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is
not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The
cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law
has not increased, but diminished.

If only he were correct. Instead, the same flawed arguments that were once used to ban whiskey are used today against a litany of “sins” — marijuana, tobacco, and fatty foods, to name a few.

Radley Balko, from whence the Mencken quote came, points out in his piece the difference between the war on pleasures bygone and present:

The main difference between the two prohibitions is that one was
enacted lawfully, and once it became clear that it had failed, we
repealed it (and government revenues soared with new alcohol taxes). As the drug war has failed, the government merely claims more powers to fight it more aggressively.

But we should not get too depressed — for today is a celebration of those liberties that have been won, not those that have yet to be achieved. I’ll close with the final paragraph in a piece by Jacob Grier:

Bringing the modern nanny state to heel will depend on countless
individuals standing up against those who would trade our liberties for their preferences. On this Repeal Day, raise a glass to freedom regained and to freedoms still to be won. Cheers to the 21st Amendment!

I’ll drink to that.