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The mainstream argument for legalization is pragmatic: the war against drugs has failed, and the cost to society of keeping them illegal is greater than the cost of learning to live with them. Out at the fringes of respectability is the libertarian argument: people have the right to control their own lives, even to wreck their own lives, if that is their choice. Unmentioned as a reason for legalizing drugs, though widely believed and acted on as a practical matter by most Americans, is what might be called the Dionysian argument. Look, it says, the desire for an occasional artificial escape from the human condition is part of the human condition. It is not ignoble. In fact it's healthy. Yes, yes, within limits.
Please don't get the wrong idea. The author of this essay is no one's idea of a wild Dionysiac. That, in a way, is the point. The desire to get high occasionally is not restricted to a small self-destructive minority. It's shared by the most boring and respectable citizens.
The goal of sensible social policy should be to channel this natural human desire in safer directions, not to snuff it out, which is neither possible nor desirable. Thinking about the drug problem in this way focuses special attention on the role of marijuana. Current policy steers people like you and me, fellow bourgeois TIME readers, away from marijuana and toward alcohol. Is that a good idea? I'm not sure. Legalizing marijuana might steer the users of crack, heroin, PCP, etc., toward grass instead. Whether that's a good idea seems much clearer.
To repeat: the mere fact that getting high on marijuana brings pleasure to the vast majority of its adult users is not sufficient reason to legalize it. The majority of people probably could drive safely at 75 or 80 m.p.h., but we can't custom-make the rules for each individual and it's the minority at greatest risk we have to worry about. If a significant minority cannot use marijuana safely, if grass frequently leads to more dangerous drugs, if it has dangerous long-term side effects of its own, if the problems of keeping it from children are insurmountable, these are all important and possibly determinative considerations. But society's ability to weigh these factors is hobbled by its inability to accept the obvious truth: like alcohol's, marijuana's function as a pleasure drug is a plus, not a minus in the calculation.
In trying to make this case, it may seem like an unnecessary, self-imposed handicap to start off with a quote from The Greening of America, the definitive expression of the 1960s zeitgeist and possibly the most foolish book ever to be serialized in The New Yorker and debated on the New York Times op-ed page (though that is a bold claim). But just 18 years ago, a book rhapsodizing about the pleasures of getting high got the kind of serious attention reserved more recently for The Fate of the Earth and The Closing of the American Mind. This is a sharp reminder of how far we've veered in the other direction, to the point where the Dionysian impulse is considered an illegitimate subject for social policy, except for the question of how far we dare to go in smothering it.