On blunts

Today I was riding my bike home from work, and, as is usually the case, I ran into a red light at Harrison and Cesar Chavez. Now, Harrison does a sort of horseshoe action from 26th to Precita, which means that if the light at Cesar Chavez is red, it makes more sense for me to stop up at 26th, so that I can get a downhill boost when the light turns green and coast uphill to Precita in one fell swoop.

Anyway. So I was stopped at Harrison and 26th, which just so happens to be right in front of some lively projects. I say "lively" because there's always a good amount of hustle and bustle, kids playing on the sidewalk, dudes standing in their doorway talking with other dudes, people shouting things across the way, all that sort of thing.* This time, there was a dude standing in his doorway, and he looked at me and shouted, "Get some blunts, nigga!"

Before I could react, I heard a voice from behind me say "Alright"--it was the person he was actually talking to, who was emerging from a corner market. (EDIT: Maybe I should mention here that neither of these guys were, in fact, black. Don't want to mislead anyone...) So I guess this guy wanted his friend to get some papers so that they could smoke some fatty bluntz.

Now here's the thing: I was just sitting on my bike, waiting for the light to turn, taking in this humdrum slice of city life, when it occurred to me how insane it is that there's a whole lot of people in this country who firmly believe that what would be awesome in that situation is if some cops forcibly busted into that guy's house and arrested him for doing drugs. I mean, anyone can tell you what that guy's going to be doing with his life for the next few hours: something wildly uninteresting, like watching TV or playing GTA4. This is all that stoned people can do. And yet, this behavior is supposed to pose such a fundamental threat to the very foundations of civilization that we should--nay, must--bust their asses.

But the question is--why? What does this do? For anyone? Getting arrested by the police--and certainly going to prison--is far, far, far more likely to mess you up than smoking weed. And this I know, for the simple reason that virtually every single person I've ever known has smoked weed at least once (even, apparently, my grandparents, to "see what the fuss was about"), and virtually none of them are worse off for it. And, though I don't know anyone who has been seriously arrested or done hard time, I think it's pretty safe to say that that kind of experience mostly has an adverse effect on one's development, it pretty much amounting to an exercise in alienating the criminal from civil institutions of law and order and forcing him to brush shoulders with the dregs of society for a couple of months.

I mean, I think that reasonable people can take a paternal interest in trying to get that guy to not smoke weed. I even think that reasonable people could act on this interest by outlawing the stuff, if they think that keeping it legal lends it a patina of respectability that causes a significant increase in the number of users. But if the concern really is paternalistic, then it doesn't make a lick of sense to make the punishment a hundred times more damaging to the individual than the crime itself. And yet, at the level of federal policy and majority public sentiment, this is about where we are.


*It is best to be explicit here: I am not pulling one of those "I'm-a-white-person-who's-so-totally-with-it-and-urban-that-I-can-talk-about-hanging-around-the-projects-like-it's-no-big-deal" moves that gentrifiers are constantly pulling (and, yes, I am a card-carrying white gentrifier). I hate that. It's just so Stuff White People Like. So let me say that, no, I'm not completely at ease while idling on my bike in the projects--or at least, definitely less at ease than when I'm idling in some other area. At the same time, though, familiarity has an interesting way of making things less scary. Idling in some strange corner of the city is one thing--but idling on my bike route is quite another. It's like, when you can claim some place as somehow being your home or a part of your home, you suddenly get a confidence or leverage to be able to carry youself in a "Fuck you, what's wrong with you?" way that makes you feel safer, like that a significant majority of people in the surrounding area--being normal, decent people--have your back in the event that you encounter a dangerous jerk.