We no longer care whether you smoked weed, and neither does the governor
You don’t have to be all-that-old to remember the days when any public official or quasi-public official who dabbled in marijuana ran the risk of becoming front page news if that dabbling in some way became known or even suspected.
For people who think today’s press is shallow and unimaginative, it should be pointed out that for a period of time in the 1990s, the first question asked of any political candidate was not about their plans for jobs, education or poverty; it was “Have you ever smoked marijuana?”
Even perfectly innocent politicians who wouldn’t have known a roach from a road cone were subjected to headlines of “Delegate denies having used marijuana,” which of course made everyone assume they had smoked marijuana.
But now the state has said, in Emily Litella style, never mind. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has pardoned 175,000 people who got caught in the illegalities of weed.
At first I thought this meant 175,000 stoners would be released all at once from prison, and I thought, whoa, Nabisco better get itself ready for a huge run on Oreos.
But many of these convictions were from a long, long time ago, when the music used to make us dance and we’d be happy for a while. Until we’d wake up in the morning unable to remember where we’d left our pants.
It still matters, though, because these convictions remained on the books and could prevent people from getting a job, a mortgage or a seat on the Supreme Court.
No, really, a cat named Douglas Ginsburg was all set to be the next high-court justice in 1987 when he acknowledged he had smoked marijuana “on a few occasions” and that was it for him.
Today, the thought of an honest Supreme Court justice is as foreign as antlers on a possum, but crazy to say, back then people frowned on judges who lied. So this admission cost him the job, even if alleged marijuana use didn’t cost President Bill Clinton — nothing did — who said his puffs on a doobie shouldn’t count because he “didn’t inhale.”
But for much of non-privileged society, marijuana became the law-enforcement equivalent of a broken taillight — an excuse to bring other charges, or even put away someone the cops didn’t like the looks of. The presence of rolling papers or a pipe or other “paraphernalia,” as the police reports opaquely put it, was evidence enough to run people in.
Naturally, this inequity fell most heavily on urban Blacks, and was used as a get-into-jail-free card for a society whose primary use for people of color was as organisms that required guarding in communities whose leaders had failed to bring in any other form of employment.
On a happier note, it was also used as justification for confiscation of high-priced luxury vehicles and boats under a law that allowed the fuzz to seize your yacht if they found so much as a marijuana seed on board.
Ostensibly this was to punish suspected drug runners, but police were quick to discover that, as fundraisers go, it sure beat a boot drive. If you could confiscate a BMW, sell it and keep a share of the proceeds, there wasn’t a lot of incentive to distinguish between a member of the Medellín drug cartel and a superfan of the Grateful Dead.
Now, of course, it all seems so ridiculous. Today the same governments that made money prosecuting marijuana users are now making money off the sale of marijuana. No reporters are asking candidates if they ever smoked marijuana.
I would view that as progress, except that the question du jour that has replaced “Have you ever tried marijuana?” with “Have you ever tried to overthrow democracy?” does not exactly portend a brighter American tomorrow.
But we take our victories where we can find them, and the Cheech-and-Chong-ification of our society is as good a place to start as any.
More Tim: In the immortal battle of man vs. fly, the flies are winning — despite the eSwatter
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Wes Moore action highlights the change in attitude toward weed