SALON

Friday, Sep 21, 2012 4:15 PM UTC

Drug war hypocrite No. 1

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper -- a brewpub founder -- is wildly overreacting on marijuana

By

Topics: War on Drugs, Medical Marijuana, John Hickenlooper,

Drug war hypocrite No. 1Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (Credit: AP/Ed Andrieski)

If you heard a drug dealer denigrate his competitor’s product as unsafe, would you trust his criticism? Or would you think he’s a hypocrite with ulterior motives? Last week, thanks to Colorado’s Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, these became the central political questions in the fight over whether to continue America’s destructive War on Marijuana.

The front line in that war is Colorado, where the federal government has interfered with its system of state-regulated medical marijuana businesses, despite President Obama’s promise to refrain from doing so. Countering that crackdown is a 2012 ballot initiative that would make Colorado the first state to fully legalize marijuana and regulate it like alcohol.

Enter Hickenlooper. In the same month a poll showed majority support for the marijuana legalization initiative, the governor blasted the measure for allegedly “detract(ing) from efforts to make Colorado the healthiest state” and for “send(ing) the wrong message to kids.”

What makes his announcement so stunning, and what evokes the drug-dealer comparison, is the governor’s career as a purveyor of the drug commonly known as alcohol. That’s right, as the founder of the state’s first brewpub, Hickenlooper was instrumental in flooding the state with his beery drug of choice. In fact, he is so proud of his record pushing that mind-altering substance that he recently made national headlines telling reporters that “I’m the first brewer who’s ever been a governor.”

So it all comes down to trust. Will voters trust that their beer-mogul-turned-governor is actually worried about health and children? Let’s hope not, because when you put Hickenlooper’s brewing career and beer triumphalism next to his marijuana fearmongering, he’s essentially saying that while pot is unhealthy and bad for kids, alcohol is not — and that assertion is not supported by facts.

Whereas the Centers for Disease Control report that alcohol use is the third leading lifestyle-related cause of death, marijuana use has never been shown to kill a single person. Whereas the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse reports that more than a third of violent crimes are connected to alcohol use, no research has ever shown a correlation between violence and marijuana use. And whereas alcohol is a known carcinogen, pot has never been proven to contribute to cancer. All of this explains why in a 2006 commercial trying to make teenagers dislike marijuana, the Bush administration’s drug czar’s office inadvertently let slip that pot is “the safest thing in the world.”

The standard retort to these facts is to insist that two wrongs do not make a right and to then claim that marijuana prohibition at least keeps one of those wrongs off the market. But those suppositions are negated by three realities:

1) Under our existing prohibition, marijuana is already “almost universally available,” according to the federal government.

2) Because it is available but not legal, marijuana is not adequately regulated for quality, and that poses safety hazards.

3) Even if you do believe all mind-altering drugs are “wrong,” it makes no sense healthwise to only let users choose a dangerous substance (alcohol) rather than a safer alternative (pot).

But then, that last item spotlights a powerful economic force shaping the politics of drugs. Despite the health consequences of alcohol, the alcohol industry has an obvious business interest in maintaining the status quo — a market that legally prefers alcohol over marijuana.

This is almost certainly why the industry bankrolled the fight against more tolerant marijuana policies in California and probably why the nation’s first self-described brewer-governor opposes the measure in Colorado. Alcohol peddlers and their political allies are simply trying to preserve a government-mandated monopoly — health, safety and facts be damned.

Continue Reading Close
David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He co-hosts The Rundown with Sirota & Brown on AM630 KHOW in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 13 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations