I wrote the other day that support for the legalization of marijuana is higher than support for Barack Obama with nearly half of all adult Americans in favor of ending the criminal penalties for personal use that further overcrowd our prisons.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Shortly after taking office, the new president — himself a pot smoker as a teenager — asked that Americans tell him what was on their minds. Of the top 10 responses he received, five concerned easing penalties for marijuana use. Which makes the boilerplate response of the National Institutes of Health to renewed calls for legalization so damned depressing.
As it has for decades, the NIH continues to assert that marijuana is bad, bad, bad. But in its latest statement it says that marijuana “is associated” with addiction, respiratory disease and cognitive impairment. Note that it is careful to not say that the evil weed is addictive because its scientists know that it is not, tens of millions of people who grew up in the 1960s know it is not, and it is some of those very people — now governors and legislators — who are calling for legalization.
Don’t expect the administration to have a serious debate about the issue as it has had over health-care reform and the war in Afghanistan, to name two biggies. It will continue to duck an issue where it would have a cede the high ground, and if that ain’t cowardly then I don’t know what is.