High Traveling

I clicked on this Fred Gardner article expecting either a well-reasoned, rational argument for some aspect of legalization of hemp--or a depressing report about how drug law lunacy resulted in someone being thrown into the clink...

Instead, imagine my surprise when the focus turned out to be Rick Steves--host of a travel program I've occasionally caught on PBS when little else is on the tube. Turns out, Steves is a member of NORML and spoke at a keynote address at their annual convention:

When you think about taking a trip, you can take a trip with your marijuana or you can take a trip with your passport. It's kind of fun to take a trip without having to travel. Just put me in a nice location with a National Geogrpahic and a joint and I'm climbing Mt. Everest. That travel is really quite cheap if the dollar's too low... And you can do your actual travel and mix some appreciation of marijuana into that and it becomes kind of super-travel.

Yet, super-travel for some results in less-than-four-star-accomodations:

750,000 Americans were arrested last year because of marijuana, 88% of them for simple possession. Our country blew 7 billion dollars on this. This should be a conservative issue. We can talk about the European solution. Fifteen years they've been experimentingwith treating marijuana as a medical concern rather than a criminal one. Even crusty, conservative law enforcement types like it this way. We need to pre-empt the discredit. They're going to say: You're for children abusing drugs? No, we're not for children smoking pot, we're not for hard drugs, we're not for driving when you're high, none of that stuff. But you need to pre-empt that because they'll try to discredit you right away... Responsible adult use is okay, but nobody's talking about kids getting easy access to pot. We need to shoot off that torpedo before they torpedo us with it.

People think advocating for NORML is advocating for breaking a law. It's not. It's advocating to change a law -and that's a very fundamental difference. I'm not saying to smoke pot. I'[m saying it's wrong to arrest people who want to smoke pot as mature adults, or for medical use. We're not saying break the law. I want to support NORML publicly like I support travel. I think it's a matter of freedom. I think it's recess, and we need it in this society.

Steves concludes:

Being high to me is a little like Cuba. Any time my government says I can't go somewhere, I feel it's one of my rights to go there. My government can't tell me I can't go to Cuba. Everyone else is going to Cuba, why can't I go to Cuba? And I don't think my government can tell me what I can do as a responsible citizen in the privacy of my own home. We need to challenge our friends. It's frustrating to me that there are so many potsmokers out there who don't even put two and two together. To me, NORML is not a charity, NORML is a service.

So, happy travels, even if you're just staying home.

In spite of being excerpts, the speech isn't short--but it's worth looking at. Steves manages to incorporate any number of issues into an overall theme that makes a lot of sense.