“Michael Phelps, Hypocrisy, and American Drug Policy”

The title of this post is the title of this effective new commentary by John Santore at the Huffington Post.  The piece reflects some of my own reactions to the hub-bub over the news, detailed here at CNN, concerning the published picture of Olympic champion Michael Phelps smoking a marijuana pipe.  Here are two potent paragraphs from the commentary:

While marijuana laws have changed over time, and while past administrations have attempted to show that the situation isn’t as dire as it appears to be, drug policy in the United States is immensely hypocritical and destructive.  Today, public figures justify past drug use as “youthful indiscretions” and the matter is dropped.  But huge numbers of ordinary Americans are introduced to the jail system because of minor drug offenses, and as the records show, the overwhelmingly disproportionate nature of drug arrests creates a justified perception of injustice and both economic and racial bias.

Will Michael Phelps have to go to court for his actions? No. (Nor should he have to.)  Will any law enforcement jurisdiction in America conduct a systematic raid of a college dorm at a prominent university with the goal of arresting everyone in possession of marijuana? Of course not.  If such an action was taken on a broad scale, the arrests would likely be in the thousands.  At the same time, will poor Americans, overwhelmingly minority in ethnicity, continue to be arrested by local police for the possession of small amounts of pot? Absolutely.