Ross Douthat is a loser narc.

And are Times editors in a coma? An investigation.

In his latest column, “Marijuana Legalization is a big mistake,” Ross Douthat tries to preempt criticisms that he’s a square, loser narc:

Of all the ways to win a culture war, the smoothest is to just make the other side seem hopelessly uncool. So it’s been with the march of marijuana legalization: There have been moral arguments about the excesses of the drug war and medical arguments about the potential benefits of pot, but the vibe of the whole debate has pitted the chill against the uptight, the cool against the square, the relaxed future against the Principal Skinners of the past.

As support for legalization has climbed, commanding a two-thirds majority in recent polling, any contrary argument has come to feel a bit futile, and even modest cavils are couched in an apologetic and defensive style. Of course I don’t question the right to get high, but perhaps the pervasive smell of weed in our cities is a bit unfortunate …? I’m not a narc or anything, but maybe New York City doesn’t need quite so many unlicensed pot dealers … ‌ ?

Of the many scents afflicting New York City, pot’s offensiveness is a 2 on a scale of 10. Also, you are a narc. It is absolutely wonderful that you can walk to a bodega and get quality gummies, instead of wait in line at the two legal pot stores in Manhattan. Plus you have the added bonus of sticking it to Eric Adams every time your money goes to a nice immigrant bodega family instead of the city budget, which just mostly flows to the inept and dangerous NYPD (I’m being too glib here—Housing Works, which co-operates one of the legal dispensaries, is a great organization. But umm there’s enough demand to float Housing Works and 3/4ths of the bodegas in the city.)

So what is Douthat’s argument in favor of spoiling everyone’s fun?

First, on the criminal justice front, the expectation that legalizing pot would help reduce America’s prison population by clearing out nonviolent offenders was always overdrawn, since marijuana convictions made up a small share of the incarceration rate even at its height.

Absolutely no one thought legalization would reduce the prison population. Worse than narcs, traditional prosecutors have a multitude of creative ways to stack charges so that no one goes to prison *just* for having a joint on them.

But Lehman argues that there is also no good evidence so far that legalization reduces racially discriminatory patterns of policing and arrests. In his view cops often use marijuana as a pretext to search someone they suspect of a more serious crime, and they simply substitute some other pretext when the law changes, leaving arrest rates basically unchanged.

First of all, the NYPD still arrests people for pot. There’s a loop-hole in the legalization statute that allows police to search and arrerst based on quantity (separate from illegal sales). Beyond that the reasoning here sounds more like an argument for curbing police use of illegal stops, not the perils of legalization.

Point number 2:

There was hope, and some early evidence, that legal pot might substitute for opioid use, but some of the more recent data cuts the other way: A new paper published in the Journal of Health Economics finds that “legal medical marijuana, particularly when available through retail dispensaries, is associated with higher opioid mortality.”

I swear, NYT’s editors must be in comas. The study he cites says that the correlation between legalization and opioid deaths is probably due to the fact that more states legalized at a time when deadly fentanyl hit the drug supply. One has nothing to do with the other.

Point number 3:

There are therapeutic benefits to cannabis that justify its availability for prescription, but the evidence for its risks keeps increasing: This month brought a new paperstrengthening the link between heavy pot use and the onset of schizophrenia in young men.

Yes, narc, an old lady shouldn’t be allowed to eat an edible for her arthritis because young men, who are most at risk for developing schizophrenia, also happen to smoke pot. Also, speaking of scents and psychosis, you know what smells REALLY bad and causes psychotic episodes? K2, the synthetic marijuana product bodegas used to sell that would trigger psychosis in mostly homeless people. I haven’t smelled the landfill-on-fire smell of K2 in years, probably because people can get actual pot in bodegas.

And the broad downside risks of marijuana, beyond extreme dangers like schizophrenia, remain as evident as ever: A form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn’t mortally dangerous in the way of heroin but that can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives.

Narc, this is true of every substance, most of all, alcohol. Douthat goes on to complain about the black market that has sprung up because legal weed is taxed and therefor more expensive “and if you want the licensed market to crowd out the black market instead, you probably need to legal pot as cheap as possible, which in turn undermines any effort to discourage chronic, life-altering abuse.”

I think the jury is still out on sin taxes. People point to cigarettes, but higher taxes on smokes coincided with the rise of massive social stigma against nicotine. Also the people prone to “life-altering” marijuana use would crawl through broken bong glass to get their weed—higher taxes will not dissuade them. I guess higher taxes might keep some people from ever trying it, except that’s not how teenagers operate (if your teenager is doing cost-benefit analysis re: marijuana taxes you have bigger problems). I was a nerd in high school and I still managed to try pot. And college? If Douthat is offended by the smell of weed in New York City he definitely shouldn't go to the hippie college I went to in Portland, Oregon. Far before legalization security guards were instructed to let kids openly smoke weed.

So what is the narc’s solution to the perils of legal weed? One possibility is tighter regulation, but the narc prefers more punishment. “Or they can reach for the blunt instrument of re-criminalization, which Lehman prefers for its simplicity — with medical exceptions still carved out, and with the possibility that possession could remain legal and that only production and distribution be prohibited.” OK but — that just makes it so it all becomes a Black market. I can’t fathom how uncool one has to be to not know that for the well-off, weed has been widely available since at least the 1990s with absolutely no risk. Well, the risk of getting too high, because when you take a hit at a party you don’t know how strong it is, whereas you know exactly how to portion legal weed products. But in that time as Douthat himself points out, pot was used as a pretext to bust Black and brown people. The NYPD actually had this neat little trick: small amounts have been legal since the 1970s, but not if they’re out in the open. So they’d. case young people of color and take their pot out, thereby putting it in public view which could lead to an arrest or summons. There is nothing in the narc’s argument that justifies any re-criminalization, there is no way it won’t be abused in actually life-altering ways.