Books, Arts & Manners: To Legalize or Not to Legalize?

Marijuana—The New Prohibition By John Kaplan

World, 386 pp.t $8.50 “I cannot escape the feeling that drug use, aside from any harm it does,” writes John Kaplan in his preface, “is somehow wrong.” Kaplan, a forty-oneyear-old Stanford Law professor, who neither smokes nor drinks, has not come to praise pot, but to argue the case for its legalization. He concedes the public-health hazard such a step would involve, but maintains that the hazard already exists as surely as air pollution, and “despite its mightiest efforts, the criminal law shows today no sign of being able to dislodge it.” On the contrary, “the criminal law in many ways will continue to aggravate the problem.”

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Larry DuBois

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Marijuana—The New Prohibition By John Kaplan

World, 386 pp.t $8.50 “I cannot escape the feeling that drug use, aside from any harm it does,” writes John Kaplan in his preface, “is somehow wrong.” Kaplan, a forty-oneyear-old Stanford Law professor, who neither smokes nor drinks, has not come to praise pot, but to argue the case for its legalization. He concedes the public-health hazard such a step would involve, but maintains that the hazard already exists as surely as air pollution, and “despite its mightiest efforts, the criminal law shows today no sign of being able to dislodge it.” On the contrary, “the criminal law in many ways will continue to aggravate the problem.”