Phelps' bong, Rule of Law, promoting lies, and evolving beliefs about Prohibition II

In an essay on how Obama has been a disappointment with the War on Drugs, Matt Welch (in his essay in Reason) focuses on the different attitudes of the youth toward Legalization and Prohibition.

One could argue that this is an eternal function of youth-- that young people are most likely to embrace such freedoms for themselves and thus, for others as well. And I'm sure that some of that is true.

But Daniel Willams argued (at the Indiana/Kentucky Libertarian convention this weekend) that the young will more reliably and consistently be Libertarian given that they're the first Internet generation-- a medium that is inherently libertarian if not Libertarian. No taxes, no regulations, freedom of information, etc.

In any case, Welch makes a number of nice observations-- about Obama and the evolving culture. In this excerpt, he starts with the incident with Michael Phelps smoking a bong at a party-- and ends with a punch in the gut to those who claim to respect Rule of Law...

As a nation prepared for the usual round of hypocritical and self-righteous denunciations, something stranger happened: nothing...

Ostensibly conservative corporate America, at least in the form of Phelps’ many sponsors, almost unanimously stood by their man. The one company that did not, cereal-maker Kellogg Co., found itself the target of a boycott, and its spokespeople spent the month of February loudly (and not very convincingly) claiming that the two sides’ parting of the ways was a simple matter of a contract expiring. “Our marijuana laws have been ludicrous for as long as we’ve been alive,” the conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in the Washington Post. “The problem isn’t Phelps, who is, in fact, an adult. The problem is our laws—and our lies.”

Aside from the shattered lives of those caught either in the drug war or in the dangerous black market that prohibition produces, it is the lies that make marijuana criminalization so infuriating. For decades we have allowed billions of our tax dollars to be spent on propaganda telling us, falsely, that pot is “dangerous,” that winners don’t do drugs, and that recreational drug users finance terrorism. Barack Obama is the living refutation of all of that: Not only did he inhale, but he freely admitted that “that was the point.” Yet countless federal agencies still require either marijuana-free pasts or (more likely) skilled lying about it. This at a time when more than half of Americans born after World War II have tried pot at least once.

Forcing people to lie, even a little bit, is one of the single most appalling and corrosive things a government can do. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this model is ultimately unsustainable, for the simple reason that people would rather tell the truth.