On Point: Marijuana madness

Published November 3, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Opinion Columns & Blogs

What's with marijuana enthusiasts' blind spot toward free speech?

Last Friday, you may recall, a noisy swarm of pro-pot protesters associated with the group Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation disrupted speeches by state officials who oppose Amendment 44, which would legalize possession of up to an ounce. For a while their clamor actually drowned out Attorney General John Suthers.

The News quickly denounced this assault on freedom in an editorial, pointing out that state officials had a permit for their rally and enjoyed a fundamental right to speak, whatever a mob of self-righteous bullies might have thought.

Even some protesters must later have realized their mistake - in terms of disastrous PR, if nothing else.

So imagine my surprise when Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, e-mailed me this week to rail against the protest's critics.

"I'm genuinely dismayed," he wrote, "to see the Rocky Mountain News' editorial board chose to highlight Governor (Bill) Owens' disgusting slur rather than one hundred and fifty Coloradans' righteous and angry tones confronting prevaricating politicians . . ."

St. Pierre, who witnessed the protest, seems to believe the First Amendment does not apply to anyone who utters what he considers a dangerous lie.

Still, St. Pierre does make one defensible point, which he reiterated to me in a subsequent conversation. He complains that Owens was out of line in comparing the protesters to "brownshirts" - aka Nazi storm troopers. And to be fair, the Nazi analogy in contemporary America is almost always a stretch.

So let's concede that SAFER protesters were by no means the modern equivalent of Ernst Rohm's SA. A more generic term will have to do for those who deny freedom of speech to their fellow citizens.

My humble vote is for "fascists."

Is all hope lost?

One of the most eloquent and informed supporters of the Iraq war threw in the towel this week, and he may well be right that all is lost. Still, Ralph Peters' newfound fatalism is almost surely wrong.

Peters is a former Army intelligence officer and prolific author who knows the Middle East better than 99 percent of Americans on both sides of the war divide. And he has spent plenty of time in Iraq since the invasion.

But the guarded optimism he exuded as recently as last spring is gone. "Those of us who hoped that the Iraqis could achieve democracy were wrong," he wrote in a column Thursday in USA Today.

Although Americans gave the Iraqis "a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy," Peters wrote, "They preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption. It appears that the cynics were right: Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it. And people get the government they deserve.

"For us, Iraq's impending failure is an embarrassment. For the Iraqis - and other Arabs - it's a disaster the dimensions of which they do not yet comprehend. They're gleeful at the prospect of America's humiliation. But it's their tragedy, not ours."

Peters is right that the United States in time will shrug off a failure to midwife a functioning republic in Iraq - at least after an election cycle or two in which the Republican Party is punished. The enduring disaster will indeed be Iraq's.

But Peters is more than a little smug and parochial to write off the Arabs altogether, lamenting their "comprehensive inability . . . to progress in any sphere of organized human endeavor."

People do not, in fact, always get the government they deserve. No people deserved Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin - or Saddam Hussein. And cultures long thought inhospitable to representative government and the rule of law - in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, for example - are proving the cultural determinists wrong.

George W. Bush may have picked the wrong time, place and methods to attempt to nurture democracy in an Arab-dominated state. But the president's view that "millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty" still rings true, and offers hope that Peters' bleak assessment will someday sound as dated as earlier claims that democracy would never take root beyond North America and Western Europe.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News