420 on The Meadow: Not Just a Bunch of Kids Getting High

If you go to college, you probably know at least one person who smokes marijuana. Maybe it’s you. If you don’t, go to a public area on your campus and look around. According to The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s 2011 numbers, 20.6% of the people you see are “current marijuana users” (averaged from male and female rates). And if we look at their 2008 numbers, we find that among people – not just college students – aged 21-25, slightly over half (53.9%) admitted to smoking marijuana at some point in their lifetime. So with UCSC gearing up for its annual pot-smoking festival on the Porter Meadow, “420,” and UC campus Chief of Police Nader Oweiss releasing a somewhat-menacing, but generally pretty reasonable “Public Safety Alert” about the event, we might be inclined to ask: is Business Insider’s Walter Hickey right when he says “Marijuana Has Won the War on Drugs?”

            I, for one, sure hope so. Not only has the War on Drugs been a massive expense – the Federal government has already spent over $4 billion this year – it represents one of the most egregious human rights violations in modern history. In her book, “The New Jim Crow,” Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander details the creation and perpetuation of a permanent underclass of black people, particularly black men – more of whom, she claims, are either in prison or under the observation of law enforcement now than were enslaved in 1850, the height of the slave era. One of the principal instruments of this oppression, according to both Alexander and common sense, is the War on Drugs. And with over half of all drug arrests being related to marijuana possession, there’s simply no question that marijuana prohibition is the primary driving force of that war.

            It’s also worth noting that Mexico’s drug war (which really is a war, Wikipedia estimates the number displaced at 1.6 million) can be attributed in large part to America’s marijuana prohibition policy. Just ask 2012 Presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who argued for marijuana legalization on the grounds that prohibition provides the economic means for these exceedingly violent groups to continue to operate, pointing out that several Presidents of South and Central American countries have asked that the U.S. end its puritanical policy.

            We often forget these factors when discussing marijuana legalization, opting instead to focus on the idea of individual rights, or what Nick Gillespie of Reason.com calls “pharmacological freedom” – the idea that we have the right to ingest what we want. This is of course an important factor, but we ought not to forget that there have been serious societal impacts of the War on Drugs generally and marijuana prohibition in particular. So while Chief Oweiss (who truly does seem to have safety as his main concern) may think that 420 “taints the reputation of UC Santa Cruz — its students, staff, and faculty,” I think it does quite the opposite. By hosting such an event, UCSC puts itself on the leading edge of anti-prohibition activism. Sure, some sort of petition might be more direct, but we should never discount the power of symbols to influence public opinion. After all, when we think of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century, do we picture bills and congressional proceedings, or do we picture sit-ins, bus boycotts, and marches?