Modern Vampires of the City.

A Moment of Clarity.

words.

"Would David Brooks feel the same way about drug laws if he was one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans arrested in weed-related incidents every year (it was over 700,000 people in 2012)? If he'd been prevented from getting a student loan or getting a state job because of such a bust? If he'd lost a professional license, or had his property seized, or even had a child taken away from him?

We'll never know, because by and large, people like David Brooks, or me for that matter, don't suffer serious consequences for weed arrests. Most people who get busted on pot charges are non-white and from poor neighborhoods: In the Bloomberg years, there were as many as 50,000 pot arrests a year in New York City, the overwhelming majority of which were black or Hispanic people. Brooks should ask himself how sending people to sit in Rikers on weed charges (I've met such people) reflects upon our "moral ecology," especially when it's almost guaranteed that the cops who sent that person there also smoked pot in high school and/or college.

...by making it legal, we're deciding that letting people get high is a lesser evil compared to a person's life being derailed forever by a pointless and intrinsically hypocritical marijuana arrest. But Brooks/Brown/Scarborough wouldn't know anything about that, apparently."

ROLLING STONE: Yuppie Prohibition League Denounces Pot Legalization