Snoop Dogg has something he wants to brag about:
His anecdote concluded, Snoop flashed a self-satisfied smile, held up “this”—“this” being his ever-present (on YouTube, if not on network TV or basic cable) spliff—and rewarded himself with a generous lungful.
Good for him. And yet there was something claustrophobic—stuffy, airless, excessively furtive—about Snoop’s White House marijuana adventure. What the rapper did wasn’t quite as unprecedentedly daring as he seems to suggest. Let me explain.
On June 18, 1978, the South Lawn was the scene of an all-day jazz festival—the first event of its kind and, notwithstanding the manifest jazz-lovingness of the White House’s current occupants (especially Michelle O), still the only one to have occurred on such a grand scale. I’ll get to the pot part in a moment. But first, have a look at the lineup:
Having been there (I was a junior White House staffer at the time), I can attest to the splendor and delight of that afternoon of music and jambalaya. President Carter welcomed his six hundred guests with off-the-cuff remarks, reminiscing about the Greenwich Village jazz clubs he frequented during his Navy days. “It’s long past time that a real tribute was paid to jazz musicians here at the White House,” he said, as the jazz critic Nat Hentoff remembered it. “Jazz has never received the full recognition it deserves in America—because of the racism in this country.” It was an obvious point, but to hear it spoken by a President of the United States was, for the musicians present, thrilling.
The music, considerably more than an hour’s worth, spanned time and styles. The first act was Eubie Blake, the great ragtime pianist and composer, born in 1887, during the first Cleveland Administration. The last—and for some the most memorable—was an impromptu trio consisting of Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Max Roach on hi-hat, and, on what it would be charitable to call vocals, the once and future peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter. The tune, written thirty-five years earlier by Diz, with the encouragement and assistance of Charlie Parker and Kenny Clarke, was, of course, “Salt Peanuts.”
And the weed? Well, I was too insignificant to rate a folding chair, so at one point I found myself wandering near the copse of trees and shrubs that conceal the Presidential tennis court, west of the main expanse of the South Lawn. A faint wisp of smoke, barely visible, came wafting through the foliage. Sniffing the air, I detected what the newspapers of the day used to call, invariably, “the sweet smell of marijuana.” (Or “marihuana,” as the federal drug bureaucracy still insisted on spelling it.) Moments later, a quartet of sidemen sauntered from the bushes, looking mellow. They had chosen a far pleasanter setting than a toilet stall, and they hadn’t been obliged to answer any questions about number one or number two.
Perhaps they were counting on the forbearance of their host, who, as a candidate, had advocated the decriminalization of cannabis. (Sadly, as with labor-law reform and universal health care, President Carter was unable to bring Congress along.)
Come to think of it, maybe Snoop Dogg was counting on the forbearance of his host. Barack Obama, onetime stalwart of the Choom Gang and inventor of the “roof hits” method, has made no secret of his belief that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and that, as he told David Remnick last fall, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.”
Obama has been playing the long game on pot, much as he has on some other booby-trapped issues. On gays in the military, he arranged for the policy change to emerge from within the Pentagon. On marriage equality, he let the states, the courts, and public opinion take the lead while he himself “evolved” just slowly enough to avoid a scorched-earth Tea Party counteroffensive. On health care, instead of dropping a finished plan on Congress, he learned from the Clintons’ experience and let Congress fashion the details itself, so as to coax legislators into investing their egos in it. (The result might as accurately be called Congresscare—or Senatecare, or Baucuscare—as Obamacare. And unlike Hillarycare, it is law.)
In the same manner, the President has been strategically circumspect on the weed question. He has used his executive discretion to allow Colorado and Washington State to go forward with full legalization, and to permit thirty-three other states to experiment with allowing cannabis for medicinal use, even though all such activities are illegal under federal law. He ought to go further.
On Sunday, July 27th, the editorial board of the Times explicitly called for an end to marijuana prohibition, and all of last week the paper followed up with editorial-page articles exploring various aspects of what legalization would entail. (The whole package is well worth reading as a thorough primer on the issue.) The Times’ evolution is emblematic of a slow but profound change, over decades, in élite opinion. But the change is hardly limited to élites—or to liberals. Polls show that a plurality of Americans—including a solid third of Republicans and large majorities of people in their teens, twenties, and thirties—favor legalization. Among political figures, admitted violators of the federal pot laws come from all across the political spectrum. Wikipedia, as of this writing, has a well-sourced list of forty-three of them, ranging from Clarence Thomas, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich to Howard Dean, Andrew Cuomo, Al Gore, and John Kerry, not to mention the last three Presidents: the non-inhaler, the twelve-stepper, and the roof-hitter.
When it comes to executive orders, the roof-hitter has a long way to go before he catches up with Carter (320), Reagan (381), Clinton (364), or George W. Bush (291). At last count, Obama had issued a hundred and eighty-three. One more he could issue—and should, without delay—would remove marijuana from the government’s list of Schedule I drugs, which includes heroin and LSD, and demote it to, say, Schedule V, down there with codeine cough syrup—or, at the very least, to Schedule II, with cocaine and methadone. It’s time for Obama to get out in front of the parade. The times, as well as the Times, they are a-changin’. There’s room for choom, and all that jazz.
