The vices we crave, within reach
Customers line up at Rocky Mountain Cannabis in Dinosaur, Colo. Credit: Joe Sohm/Universal Images Group
The first time I posed the unanswerable question, it was directed at the mayor of the tiny South Carolina town where my journalism career began.
Ground was being broken for a development anchoring the gentrifying of the town’s most depressingly impoverished area. The mayor promised the initiative would drive away the scourges of prostitution and drug houses and shady juke joints darkening the neighborhood.
The question?
"If you clean up this area, where are your constituents going to procure the prostitution and drugs and other vices they demand access to? These people like their scourges, sir, and they like 'em convenient!"
I've since asked a dozen elected officials versions of this question, to mostly startled responses. Politicians usually operate as if their constituents need to be protected from the vices, legal and illegal, that the constituents themselves are buying, selling, growing, manufacturing, dancing in, eating, smoking, snorting, shooting up, filming, watching and buying complex paraphernalia for.
As the municipalities of Long Island consider whether to ban the sale of marijuana, leaders and residents alike ought to consider who wants the drug, and the powerful difference between regulating, banning and foolishness.
Last month New York became the 15th state to legalize recreational marijuana. I’ve had edibles from Massachusetts in the car since the law changed, and after programming our heads with decades of illicit drug use, it’s very hard to accept that it’s now … licit? The brain just won’t stop screeching, "SLOW DOWN, WHAT IF A COP SEES THE GUMMIES???"
But it is legal, because a sizable majority of New Yorkers thought it should be, and because many of them wish to grow and buy it.
And now we get down to the difference between banning and zoning, which is like the difference between my wife burning my MC Hammer-era parachute pants and her demanding they be stored in a trunk in an attic under a sign that says, "Beware of crippling, unjustified nostalgia!"
"I just don’t wanna see it!" is a cleaner play than "I just don’t wanna let you to do it!"
Long Island is the land of 1,000 municipalities, and it's not that big a deal if some ban marijuana sales, but it is dumb in this sense: The biggest fear of marijuana legalization is impaired driving. Decreeing that your residents must drive to and from another municipality to get it seems more like an Onion headline than a governance plan.
It is, on the other hand, reasonable to regulate the location of the vice we are increasingly legalizing. Even the biggest strip-club devotees and lovers of drugs and prostitution and gambling generally won’t want the John’s 59 Slot Casino, Bordello, Weed Parlor, Sports Book, Buffet and Burlesque Revue that will likely become a national chain lurking next to the elementary school.
But when leaders try to banish marijuana dispensaries or other vice from their communities rather than corral it, they do so out of a fundamental misunderstanding of their constituents.
Legal or illegal, the drug dealers and the strip clubs, the prostitutes and bookies and bars and liquor stores, operate where there is a market for their services. Elected leaders never need to worry about unwanted sin for sale in their communities, because there never is any for long.
It’s only the sins residents crave whose sales thrive enough to merit banishing.
Lane Filler is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
