After the outcry over President Obama’s glib response about marijuana at his online town hall, I’ve been trying to think about why I sympathized more with him than with those who were upset by his comment.

Please don’t misunderstand: I’m all in favor of legalization, not only of pot but of other drugs as well.  I am all in favor of treating addiction as a health problem and not a criminal problem.  Here in California the state was just ordered to release 50,000 prisoners over the next three years because the prisons are so overcrowded.  The majority of those who will be released are non-violent drug offenders.  I believe it’s wrong so many of them got sent to prison in the first place.

The thing about pot is, there is still a social stigma that Obama, short of sucking massive bong hits in the middle of a State of the Union, cannot hope to reverse on its own merits.  You mention legalizing marijuana and the image that leaps to mind for some people is still a bunch of hippies sitting in the mud at Woodstock, or college kids in a dorm room staring at their hands and muttering “whoa.”  Look at how pot is treated in popular culture.  Hip-hop stars rap the praises of toking, which scares the shit out of suburban white parents.  And have you ever seen a movie in which pot was treated even semi-seriously?  No, the dope smokers are always slackers and losers.  Go watch the Harold & Kumar movies or Half Baked if you aren’t sure.  Actually, I recommend Half Baked; it’s pretty damn funny even if you’re not high.  And it’s got Jon Stewart!

My mom is pretty liberal.  She’s also a cancer survivor who thinks anyone who can be helped by medicinal marijuana should have access to it.  But she also recently referred to pot as a “gateway drug.”  I think that argument has been mostly discredited by now, but many, many people still believe it.

And yet the questions voted on for the town hall, while mentioning the war on drugs and throwing out a statistic or two about our overcrowded prisons, focused on legalizing pot only.  According to Marc Ambinder over at The Atlantic, pot questions were the most-voted-for in two of the categories Obama’s staff had grouped the queries into: fiscal stability and budget.  This country has so many other problems that fall into those categories.  Obama is interested in talking about solutions for those: budget priorities, education reform, health care reform, and so on.  You push legalizing a drug that many people don’t even take seriously to the top of the list, you risk an unserious response.

Marijuana legalization needs to be pursued in a wider context.  Why just pot, for starters?  Why not coke and heroin and mushrooms and ecstasy?  The sentencing laws for those are just as draconian.  Let’s push it in an overall discussion about sentencing reform.  Or let’s push the legalization question within a broader discussion about prison reform (Glenn Greenwald has a good piece on Salon right now about Democratic senator Jim Webb and his efforts in this area, which probably would encompass the sentencing reforms as well.)  Or let’s talk about it in terms of the situation with the cartels in Mexico and the violence there spreading across our border.  Hell, let’s talk about it in terms of the health care reform debate: should sick people everywhere have access to medical marijuana?  Should we treat addiction as a health issue and if so, how much of the money we would spend on health care reform should be set aside to boost the number of clinics and treatment programs and counselors? 

The questions for the town hall began this discussion backwards.  I think the president missed a great opportunity and I was disappointed in his flip statement.  But it’s up to us, the people, to explain to him why this is an important issue to so many of us.  We did not get off to a good start.