At this point, one might conclude that collecting ideological positions that leave me stranded in political no-man’s-land has become a depraved hobby. I am a proponent of the unitary executive theory who concurrently believes that the presidency enjoys almost no power relative to Congress. I am an opponent of the death penalty who believes that almost all of the Supreme Court’s ill-contrived restrictions on the practice ought to be reversed. I am a supporter of gay marriage who nevertheless abhors the nonsensical Obergefell decision that preempted the question nationally and who is worried about the effects that the development has had on religious freedom. And, perhaps most vexingly of all, I am an advocate of the legalization of marijuana who finds the practical consequences of that policy so annoying that I have turned into a squishy agnostic on the matter. Politics, as Thomas Sowell trenchantly observed, is full of trade-offs. It is also, alas, full of non sequiturs, and nowhere, in recent years, have those non sequiturs proliferated as widely as in the realm of decriminalized weed.
For a classical liberal such as myself, the case for marijuana legalization was both simple and multifaceted: (1) that, constitutionally, the federal government possesses no enumerated power to regulate drugs, and it must therefore leave the issue to the states; (2) that in most of those states, the public is either formally (a majority wishes the law to be changed) or informally (a majority ignores the law, which breeds contempt for other laws) in favor of reform; (3) that as a practical matter, prohibition has failed badly, and this failure has had various knock-on effects that we should wish to avoid in the future; and (4) that, irrespective of all that, we institute governments to fulfill a limited set of functions within an otherwise free society, and, properly understood, the prevention of cannabis consumption is not among them. A decade after this position began to gain traction, I still believe all of these things.
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