Why the Marijuana Debate Makes Conservatives' Heads Explode

What's more worthy of moral outrage, intrusive government or private drug use?

Last week Californians didn’t even come close to passing Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana in the state. Sun Media’s Alan Shanoff is severely disappointed, but he assures us it’s not because he was hoping to head down to the West Coast for a blissful road trip. “Drug cartels, criminals, police chiefs, alcohol manufacturers and retailers, prison employees and big pharma, can now sleep easier,” he writes, as these are the only groups that have benefitted from North America’s war on pot. He calls prohibition an “abject failure,” and cites the arguments familiar to high school students the world over: pot is less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, there’s no evidence it’s a gateway drug, and kids have an easier time accessing it because it’s illegal. This is nothing new of course, except for the optimism with which Shanoff asserts “sooner or later people are going to come to their senses” and legalize pot, but it’s all the more interesting to hear coming from a conservative outlet like Sun Media.

And that is somewhat the point of Doug Saunders’s piece in the Globe and Mail. He says the legalization debate gets to the heart of “the paradox of conservatism.” It pits social conservatives (who object to pot on moral grounds) against economic conservatives (who object to government encroaching on personal freedoms). The Netherlands’ coalition government includes a third strand of ethnic conservatism, which doesn’t want anti-pot Muslim immigrants sticking their nose into the debate, and the result is an awkward compromise by which the coalition plans to ban pot being sold to foreigners, but retain the laissez-faire approach for Dutch citizens. Saunders doesn’t say so, but there are a host of other issues that expose the rift between small government- and social conservatives, notably gay marriage. Issues like these are telling when pondering “why it is that a solid blue swath of right-wing governments across the Western world is not managing to have any sort of united program or message, and in fact seems to be divided hotly against itself.”