Texas High Ways
Why the unlikeliest of states—ours—should legalize marijuana.
Sign by Roadhouse Relics
In the early years of the twentieth century, as they poured across the border into Texas, Mexican immigrants brought with them a familiar and cheap intoxicant: cannabis, which they called marihuana (in those days, it was spelled with an h instead of a j). Perhaps because they were young, predominantly male, and away from home—strong correlates of troublesome behavior—they were seen as lacking appropriate inhibition, especially when they came to town on weekends. Cerveza may have been more culpable, but cannabis made an easier target. In 1914, after a melee allegedly involving a marijuana smoker, the El Paso city government passed what is believed to have been the first law banning a drug that had been legally and widely used for at least five thousand years. Other cities and states quickly followed suit. Before long, marijuana was forbidden everywhere, and its use was often harshly punished.
It’s ironic, then, that nearly a century after it fired the first shot in the war on weed, the Sun City has been flirting with a cease-fire. In January, besieged by drug wars in Mexico that killed more than 5,600 people in 2008, almost a third in neighboring Ciudad Juárez alone, the El Paso City Council unanimously approved city representative Beto O’Rourke’s motion that the federal government hold an open and honest debate about legalizing all narcotics in the United States. Mayor John Cook vetoed that recommendation. “We would be the laughingstock of the country for having something like this on the books,” he said.
The incident drew national attention and some criticism, but it sparked the kind of serious conversation O’Rourke was seeking. “No one is laughing about it,” he says. “It’s not funny that sixteen hundred people died in our sister city in the course of one year in the most brutal fashion imaginable. We’ve had waves of violence before, but it took events of this magnitude to convince everyone that something is deeply wrong here, that we are part of the problem and we can do something to fix it. It’s the demand that’s fueling this war. If our drug laws were different, I will absolutely guarantee you that our body count would be different.”
O’Rourke’s is no solitary voice crying in the wilderness, nor is the problem limited to Texas. Noting that “the violence that we see in Mexico is fueled sixty-five to seventy percent by the trade in one drug, marijuana,” Arizona attorney general Terry Goddard has called for “at least a rational discussion as to what our country can do to take the profit out of that.” In February, a blue-ribbon Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, led by former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, called on the U.S. to change the prohibitionist policies that drive the prices of drugs to obscene levels, enable drug cartels to amass enormous wealth, and threaten the stability of several Latin American countries, including Mexico. What is needed, the commission said, is not tightening or tinkering with a failed war on drugs but a questioning of long-held assumptions and a willingness to change. More recently, U.S. senator Jim Webb, of Virginia, who was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, called for a reexamination of American drug policy, repeatedly arguing that “nothing should be off the table.”
Politicians like Webb have historically steered clear of legalization talk, fearing that a charge of being “soft on drugs” would hurt them on election day. Yet recent polls indicate that more than half of Americans—up from 29 percent a decade ago—believe recreational use of marijuana should not be a crime, and upward of 70 percent—75 percent in Texas—believe adults should be able to use the drug for medicinal purposes. Thirteen states either allow possession of small amounts or treat it as a minor violation that does not result in jail time. This change in attitude and law is grounded in experience: More than 100 million people acknowledge having used marijuana, 25 million in the past year. While most recognize that this entails some risk, they’re no longer spooked by the specter of “reefer madness.”
And they know our national drug policy, which we have tried to impose on much of the world, is deeply flawed. Only 24 percent of Americans, according to a 2008 Zogby poll, believe that the policy is effective. In the nearly forty years since Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, federal, state, and local governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on eradication, interdiction, and incarceration. They’ve seized tons of contraband, destroyed crops, and imprisoned more people than any other country, a disproportionate number of them poor and black. Despite these efforts, drugs continue to be available to meet a remarkably stable demand.
With his giant can of worms already spilling over, Barack Obama is not going to let the prospect of legalization become an unwelcome controversy—much like what gays in the military was to Bill Clinton—but he has shown signs of favoring more-rational policies. Shortly after Attorney General Eric Holder was confirmed, he announced that agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration would stop raiding medical marijuana clinics. Soon afterward, the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, said he was scrapping the war on drugs, both as a term and as a strategy, in favor of greater emphasis on prevention and treatment. In late July, U.S. envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke revealed that our country was phasing out the eradication of poppy crops there, an exercise that he said had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars, alienated farmers, and driven people into the embrace of the Taliban, all without making a dent in the amount of opium reaching the market.
Given this change in climate, from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s not surprising that serious talk of legalization is in the air. Indeed, some form seems likely to occur in the near future, driven by both democracy and demography. A longtime pro-pot activist explained it to me this way: “Every day, some kid turns eighteen and can vote. Every day, some eighty-year-old dies. It’s when, not if.”
Why shouldn’t it occur here, in Texas? President Nixon did the nation a disservice when he launched the war on drugs, but he also traveled to China, achieving one of the truly important and lasting positive accomplishments of his otherwise blighted terms in office. Without seeking parallels to his failures, I’d like to propose one to his success: As Nixon went to China, our unlikeliest of states should go to pot. We started it 95 years ago; let’s end it today.
Tracing the path by which cannabis evolved from comforting friend to criminal menace is enough to diminish one’s confidence in the rationality of legislation. In the thirties, the tough times of the Depression heightened the resentment toward Mexican workers, whose drug of choice helped make them an easy target. A Texas state senator who spoke in favor of an anti-pot bill said, “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy.” In other parts of the country, fears arose that people deprived of drink in the era of Prohibition would turn to this new and cheap source of intoxication and that many of them would behave no more respectably than those crazy Mexicans. When marijuana did, in fact, become popular with a rising number of blacks, among them jazz musicians and their ilk, its power as a symbol of the Other gained even more potency.
Prohibitionists, politicians, cops, crusading journalists, and moralists dedicated to stamping out the noxious weed had a powerful ally in Washington. Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the predecessor of the DEA) from 1930 to 1962, genuinely hated drugs and believed the best way to combat them was to scare the public and punish offenders. Although he regarded marijuana as a less serious threat than opiates or cocaine, he threw himself into the effort to demonize it, calling it an “assassin of youth” and charging that it led to violent behavior, sex crimes, and—a favorite of his—insanity.
My Library
Cara says: I am very proud of Texas Monthly for publishing the article, “Texas Highways”, by William martin in the October 2009 issue. Marijuana law reform is long overdue and I agree with Dr. William Woodward that the decision should be left up to the states and not the federal government. Our first step should be to decriminalize the possession of and use of marijuana for adults. Too much money is spent on this ridiculous war on drugs and too many non violent drug offenders are rotting away in jail because of the impertinent flaw in our legal system. Secondly we need to recognize the many benefits that legalizing marijuana will have on Texans and on the Texas economy. Marijuana produced by Texans for Texas will immediately reduce the demand for the marijuana that is being smuggled in from Mexico. With proper regulation and dare I say taxes, foreign drug cartels will cease to exist because the demand for imported drugs will diminish and therefore the supply. Marijuana could be an excellent cash crop for Texas. Demand for marijuana is high. We would not be having a “war on drugs’ if drugs were not desired. Recreational marijuana users are not alone. The amount of medical marijuana users are growing. I hate to think that that someone with a chronic or terminal condition is depriving themselves of the healing benefits of marijuana because they buy in to the taboo given to the plant by the “war on drugs”. Texas should not be so blind. Marijuana is lucrative. I would be the first person to plow under my corn and spread some marijuana seeds. (December 1st, 2009 at 5:54pm)
25 more comments | Add yours »