Going to Pot

February 2, 2015
Former U.S. secretary of education and drug "czar" Bennett (The Book of Virtues) and former federal attorney White team up for a scattered, inclusive lawyer's brief against marijuana. They argue forcefully that the pharmaceutical industry and medical marijuana movement are uncritical of the drug and unrealistically sunny about its benefits. But Bennett and White fail to probe why millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans of all ages smoke pot, or why so many Americans think legalization is a responsible public goal. The categorical claim that today's marijuana is "far more potent than the âtokes' baby boomers remember from their early experiments," meanwhile, recalls the drug war's empty rhetoric. Advancing the highly contested "gateway drug" idea, Bennett and White draw a connection between marijuana and hard drugs. Letters from anguished drug users and their families pepper the book, trying to give what otherwise would be a one-sided policy manual some pathos and a human angle. Bennett and White wind up imagining a not-likely-to-happen, star-studded Hollywood campaign against weed. An appended 2014 article from the New England Journal of Medicine does lend ample weight to their compilation of marijuana's genuinely "adverse health effects." This book will change few minds, but it will provide wide-ranging arguments against marijuana legalization.