20181230.0430

On 26 December 2018, Albert Baca's "Remove Marijuana from Schedule I Drug List" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. The article responds to an earlier opinion piece on the subject of marijuana's legal status. After noting a bit of the history of marijuana's criminalization, Baca focuses on the promise of medical marijuana and notes that some relaxation of overly strict criminal codes must occur if useful research into that promise is to be conducted. Given the recent passage of the First Step Act, Baca notes, now would be a good time to take such a measure.
I have written about such things before (here, for example), and the comments I have made in other places remain relevant. In general, I favor legalization of both medical and recreational marijuana, though I am not likely to use either. (Being among the many who bought health insurance that could not be used and so since opted out of having it, I am not in a position to visit a physician to get a prescription, and my experiences in graduate school tell me that cannabis is not my substance of choice. Caffeine takes that role.) Baca's position is therefore somewhat short of what I would see, though I think his is likely to come about before mine--even if mine is almost inevitable. (I say almost because, well, humanity might manage to get itself dead by then, which would render the issue moot.) And it is not as if I think Baca is wrong; I am generally in favor of more study, deeper investigation, though I am also aware that calls for more study are often used as catspaws for delaying actions that need to be taken.
I know, too, that there will be many who oppose relaxing restrictions on marijuana--or any substance. Many of them will view such measures as reflecting a decline in prevailing standards of decency. And they will be wrong; a loosening of restrictions does not mean a loosening of decency when standards that have been in place are themselves, in many cases, indecent. And standards that have been used to curtail human understanding and to enact systemic racism across decades are decidedly indecent. Disproportionate and unbalanced enforcement is indecent. The wholesale warehousing of populations already traumatized by the experience and legacy of trafficking is indecent. Rarely do such things get decried by the people who otherwise bemoan a lack of decency among the general public, such that I have to wonder if they even know what the word means, unless they think it is "what I want to see everybody else do."
There are enough people who seem to think it does, certainly, and more than enough. (Even one is too many.) Many of the problems of the world can be ascribed to their words and deeds, yet they still say and do much and are heard and followed all too gladly. As the year comes to a close and another promises to open, it does not look like that will change--though perhaps the change for which Baca calls may happen.