Mark Bowden: Lighten up on marijuana?

I knew when I saw my father sitting at the kitchen table that I was in trouble. I was a teenager, returning home late from a night out with my friends. I was high. As we did most nights, my friends and I had been smoking pot. It was 1970. Nearly everyone my age did.

I took a quick inventory of my state of mind and concluded that so long as my conversation with him was casual and brief, there was a chance he wouldn't notice I was cockeyed stoned. One of the virtues of pot, or so I thought then, was this ability to play it straight.

"Mark, do you smoke?" he asked.

I could not lie to my father. I hope it was because I respected him and knew he did not lie to me.

"Yes," I told him, and braced myself.

He was furious, but not about my marijuana use. He had not even considered that possibility. He thought I was smoking cigarettes!

I was not. They gave me a headache and left a god-awful taste in my mouth. They were addictive and caused cancer. But while I might not have been able to lie to my father, I was expert at withholding the complete truth. I bore the scolding manfully and gave him my word I would never smoke another cigarette. And I haven't.

Marijuana smoking is, if anything, more commonplace today than it was 40 years ago. My sons, now grown, tell me it was easier for them to get pot than it was to get beer. Generations of Americans have grown up getting high, long enough for everyone to know that all the old horror stories about its use are exaggerated. No one I knew who smoked dope as a kid turned into a heroin or cocaine addict.

Yet the war on weed rages on. Twenty-seven years after a special commission formed by Congress and President Nixon concluded that punitive marijuana laws cause more social harm than the drug itself, nearly half of the drug arrests in this country are for pot. The numbers grow annually. What a tremendous waste of money and manpower!

More than that, the prohibition of marijuana gives police an undue amount of leverage over average citizens. When something as widespread as pot possession is illegal, police can use it as an excuse to harass whole classes of otherwise law-abiding citizens. It should come as no surprise the majority of those possession busts were young black and Latino men, even though surveys show most of the marijuana users in this country are white.

I stopped smoking dope many years ago. I have always urged my children not to use it, just as I have counseled them to avoid using other drugs and getting drunk. The effects of pot use are more subtle than drunkenness, which leads many to conclude that marijuana is a less dangerous intoxicant than alcohol, but it very subtlety poses a unique threat. Because you can go to class high, go to work high, drive high and otherwise function with apparent normality, it is easier to abuse marijuana constantly than alcohol, and that "normality" you feel isn't the truth. Marijuana doesn't make you out-of-control, it just makes you stupid.

For me, as with most users, getting high was a symptom of boredom and rebellion. Once I grew up and found work that I loved, competitive work that demanded real effort and mental clarity, I realized the effects of getting high, the confusion and silliness, were a disadvantage. When I had children, the responsibility I felt for them ruled out getting high.