David Brooks confronts legal marijuana

His survey found that drug usage was common among businessmen and truck drivers as well as slum dwellers and hippies, and it had been for a long time. “Alcohol is the nation’s major drug,” consumed by perhaps 80 million Americans, Lukas wrote. Of these, roughly six million were alcoholics, and several million more suffered from severe drinking problems.

“Roughly 80 million Americans smoke cigarettes and are psychologically, if not physiologically, dependent on the drug nicotine,” Lukas added. Also, more than 10 million Americans used prescription sedatives (barbiturates and tranquilizers) and stimulants (amphetamines). Abusers of these drugs, Lukas estimated, numbered between 300,000 and 500,000 people, “many of them middle-class housewives who accumulate the drugs by getting prescriptions from many different doctors.”

Despite the seemingly bizarre nature of the hippie movement, most of the sociologists and psychologists interviewed by Lukas said they regarded the hippie drug scene not so much as a revolt against American values as a sign that those values had been subtly changing for a long time. The more exotic newer drugs, like marijuana and LSD, Lukas wrote, “are regarded with dread because they are seen as a threat to the Protestant ethic and the pioneer spirit....However, on a deeper level, psychologists and sociologists say, these drugs exert a powerful fascination for many middle-class Americans, because they suggest that this is no longer the society it proclaims to be.”

Even a conservative estimate, Lukas concluded, “suggests that more than half of America’s 200 million people use some drug, other than marijuana or the hallucinogens such as LSD.”

This narrative wasn’t what the Times editors wanted to hear. To their credit, they published Lukas’s findings in a five-part series. But they let Lukas know of their displeasure, and shortly thereafter that tenacious, methodical, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist departed the Times for a career as an independent author and writer.

‘Silly together’

That was more than four decades ago. Last week marijuana was legalized in Colorado, and New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks responded with nostalgic if superficial recollections of his own teenage experiments with pot in the mid to late ’70s. (Click here.)

“I have some fond memories of us all being silly together,” Brooks wrote. “I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.”

But Brooks and his pals subsequently gave up pot because “stoned people do stupid things,” “one member of our clique became a full-on stoner,” and “most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn’t really make you funnier or more creative,” and so they “graduated to more satisfying pleasures.” Besides, Brooks writes, “We had a vague sense” that smoking pot is “not something people admire.”

All of these points, of course, could be applied to the so-called mainstream drugs. Yet Brooks said nary a word about alcohol, tobacco, or prescription sedatives and stimulants. Instead, he condemned Colorado and similar states for “effectively encouraging drug use.”

“Laws profoundly mold culture,” Brooks helpfully informed us — where else can you get this sort of information? — “so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture?”

States like Colorado, he declared, are “nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.” End of column.

As Lloyd Bentsen said…

Say this much for Brooks: He may be shallow, but he’s consistently shallow. (To read my earlier analyses of Brooks, click here and here.)

Perhaps it’s too much to ask a Times columnist to have read a major report that once appeared in his own newspaper; after all, Brooks was not yet seven years old when Tony Lukas wrote his groundbreaking 1968 series. And perhaps it’s too much to ask a Times columnist to do a little Googling on the subject. Perhaps it’s too much to ask him to spend even five minutes wondering why it’s OK to legalize alcohol, nicotine, uppers, and downers but culturally destructive to legalize pot.

Some journalists do the heavy lifting of research and analysis; others write off the top of their heads. What Lloyd Bentsen said to Dan Quayle applies here: Mr. Brooks, you’re no Tony Lukas.