Certainly, these cartels traffic in some very bad stuff: heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine. But, says Nadelmann, "half of the Mexican drug gangs' revenue comes from marijuana. Legalizing marijuana is a pretty powerful way of depriving these gangsters of revenue — the same way we took Al Capone and those guys out."
Prohibitionists are at a loss for a coherent argument when it comes to the cartels, argues Mirken. "They'll say really dumb things like 'Legalizing marijuana isn't going to make these gangs turn into law-abiding citizens.' No, of course not! It will make them irrelevant! Just like you don't need bootleggers when you have Anheuser-Busch."
More and more credible people are echoing the sentiment. In January, Arizona attorney general Goddard opined that legalization "could certainly cut the legs out of some of these criminal activities." In February, former presidents Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León of Mexico, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, and César Gaviria of Colombia gathered at the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy and called for decriminalization, decrying the fact that "current policies are based on prejudices and fears and not on results."
Just last week, former Mexican president Vicente Fox put it plainly: "I believe it's time to open the debate over legalizing drugs."
That debate, at least, is happening in earnest. What it leads to is another matter. In the meantime, says Mirken, "We are effectively subsidizing these horrible Mexican gangs by handing them the marijuana market."
Poll position
Of course, it's not just Mexican presidents who are honest about drugs. American ones can also be pretty, er, blunt. "I inhaled frequently," then-candidate Obama admitted last year when asked if he had ever smoked pot. "That was the point."
To see how far we've come, consider the fact that, just 17 years ago, candidate Bill Clinton felt compelled to fudge his answer to that same question with his own infamous equivocation. Or that, 22 years ago, Douglas Ginsburg's admission to smoking pot cost him a Supreme Court seat.
People are much more comfortable with the idea of smoking marijuana than they once were. The media may have brewed up a tempest in a teapot when Michael Phelps was photographed with a bong held to his lips, and cereal giant Kellogg's may have voided his sponsorship deal in a panic. But most Americans couldn't give a fig.
"I do think it's begun to sink in for people now that the last three presidents have smoked marijuana," says Mirken. "As has the governor of California, the mayor of New York City, the guy [Phelps] who's won more Olympic gold medals than anyone on the planet."
Meanwhile, more and more people polled are comfortable expressing pro-legalization sentiments. "We've seen the numbers jump quite dramatically in the past six months to a year," says Nadelmann. "It's really quite something."
In February, Silver looked at the results of three polls (Rasmussen, CBS, Zogby) on fivethirtyeight.com, each of which found 40 percent or more of respondents supporting legalization. That "may be significant" he allowed, but cautioned against over-exuberance. None of this promises upward movement.
"On issues like this, yes, there are trends, but they're not necessarily inevitable," he says now. "If you were looking at the world in the 1960s, you may well have guessed that, by 2009, you'd be able to smoke pot legally."
But that didn't happen. After the '70s came the '80s. A crack epidemic. A crime wave. Nancy Reagan and "Just Say No." Moods can change. And if the pot issue moves unduly forward, wonders Silver, "Will the Republicans try to create a backlash on that and say, 'We've gone too far?' I think it's not totally out of the question, if the economy stays in the dumps for a period of months or years," he adds, "that the crime rate may increase again and that may work against legalization and harm that momentum a bit."
But generational shifts happen. And now, with most people under the age of 65 probably at least familiar with the pungent smoky odor, the trend should continue toward increased acceptance. Writing on fivethirtyeight.com, Silver predicted that "we'll need to see a supermajority of Americans" favoring legalization before politicians would be emboldened enough to press the issue.
He crunched the numbers and figured that, assuming the trend kept heading northward, we could reach 60 percent or so sometime in the next 13 years, predicts Silver. "I feel comfortable with 2022."
BREATHE EASY: Seventeen years after Bill Clinton didn’t inhale, it seems everyone — from our president to Olympic champion Michael Phelps — has admitted to toking.
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Trapped in the closet
In the past decade and a half, 13 states have legalized medical marijuana, a steady drip that is somewhat analogous — in its suddenness and once-seeming-improbability — to the snowballing momentum of gay-marriage rulings over the past several months."There's a powerful analogy between the gay-rights movement and the marijuana-law-reform movement," says Nadelmann. "Part of it is about a principle — that people should not be punished for what they do in their own home or their own personal lives. The other point is that there's an element of 'coming out' that is pivotal to the whole process of decriminalizing and ultimately legalizing the behavior."
