It is easy to denigrate any cause by the technique of putting it alongside other, nobler, causes. Thus a decade or so back Mr. John Roche elegantly dismissed the fear of guilt by association as ranking, by his hierarchy of fears, between Fear #25 and Fear #27, the former being Mr. Roche’s fear of college presidents, the latter his fear of being bitten to death by piranhas. The trouble with the technique is that it does not allow for latitudinarian preoccupation: with individuated preoccupation. Somewhere, somebody is being eaten by piranhas, or is in danger of being eaten by piranhas. I know Professor Hart both as a friend and as a craftsman, and he is altogether capable of spending a week trying to understand a single Canto of Ezra Pound, or perfecting a paragraph in one of his own books. I would never think to say to him that there are greater concerns in the world than the penetration of poetic marginalia, or graver causes than bel- letristic purity.
I do not see why we cannot proceed on the assumption that although the fear of marijuana, the need for marijuana, and the ignorance of marijuana, are neither a) the central concern of a balanced society; nor b) the most urgently needed social indulgence; nor c) the area of legislative concern about which there is the greatest ignorance— still I say: Cowan is entitled to his preoccupation, and I for one find his arguments not merely plausible, but overwhelming.
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