Putrid smell of marijuana is a public nuisance

PUBLISHED: September 6, 2024 |www.baltimoresun.com

Paul W. Gillespie/Capital Gazette Budtenders help customers on July 1, 2023, the first day recreational marijuana sales were allowed in Maryland.

In 1919, journalist Lincoln Steffens witnessed the Russian Revolution and exclaimed, “I have seen the future, and it works.” So much for clairvoyant journalism.

I submit, however, that I am on sounder ground in remarking that I have smelled the ubiquitous, putrid aromatics born by the legalization of recreational marijuana in New York City and Washington, D.C., and it doesn’t work. Indeed, the offense to the olfactory organs has become a public nuisance. Recreational marijuana users are not only harming themselves by squandering time and money on juvenile thrills. They harm others by interfering with their use and enjoyment of public property, including sidewalks and parks. You can’t escape it. There is nowhere to hide. It is a modern version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I do not think there are legal answers to the mushrooming of marijuana use at all times and in all places. Criminalization does not work. Nor does decriminalization. Oregon recently reversed decriminalization of possession of a minor quantity of certain drugs (excluding marijuana). It did not dent drug addiction or deaths from fentanyl overdoses. Portugal has been bipolar — decriminalizing possession of all drugs while increasing police patrols to deal with increased crime and drug addiction.

Marijuana abuse can only be ameliorated with a cultural change, not a legal change. The home, the classroom and the pulpit must provide intellectual and moral excitement far beyond what a marijuana high can offer. That means reading, discussing and appraising the classics and the Bible in search of truth and justice without ulterior motives. It is the only love that never grows old. In other words, we have met the enemy, our debased culture, and it’s us.

Marijuana users should be ostracized not only for interfering with the use and enjoyment of public property but for dereliction of citizen duties. We citizens are the ultimate sovereigns. We are the answer to Roman poet Juvenal’s rhetorical question, “Who will guard the guardians?” Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Or as Justice Louis D. Brandeis put it, “Sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But how can you be scrutinizing, questioning and publicly calling government to account for its chronic abuses if you are high on marijuana rollicking in fantasyland? Is that what our ancestors fought for at Lexington and Concord? Was the shot heard round the world by the Minutemen at North Bridge intended to celebrate marijuana use?

As culture decays, laws multiply. The first federal restriction on drugs surfaced 138 years after the Declaration of Independence in the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. They have expanded manifold since then. President Richard Nixon declared in 1971:

“America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive. I’ve asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive.”

But new and harsher laws did not diminish the epidemic, just as Prohibition did not lessen alcohol abuse. The economic law of supply and demand is stronger than laws passed by legislatures. Drugs will not be trafficked if there is no demand. And demand is a product of culture transmitted at home, in school and in churches, synagogues and mosques. A culture that exalts critical thinking, justice, self-discipline and wisdom as the locomotives of life — and everything else as the caboose — and finding expression in social admiration and awards will experience no drug abuse.

Leaders determine culture by oratory and example to which the wise and honest may repair, not by legal edicts or decrees. Former first lady Nancy Reagan’s bare injunction, “Just Say No,” was as futile as King Canute’s telling the waves to go back.

Mankind is made of crooked timber. True leaders lessen the crookedness by pushing culture toward the straight and narrow. The test of progress is whether you can walk the streets of New York City and Washington, D.C., without confronting an attack of marijuana fumes.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.