What’s truly amazing about the Phelps bong incident is that people manage to express shock and outrage at his behavior with a straight face. Especially given the fact that they couldn’t have really found it that unlikely that someone in Phelps’ situation would smoke some pot. I mean some of the things they say would be too over the top for an onion story:

He should have known better this time, and at this point, you wonder if Phelps has a problem. He has shown up in plenty of pictures on the Web, and you never know how credible they are. But they become more and more realistic with each verified mistake. He promises never again. To me, he has promised that already wearing red, white and blue. Maybe that Olympic ideal seems hokey to some, but he has packaged it and made the most of it.

I particularly liked the attempt in this article to reach out to the pot sympathetic crowd by suggesting that even if it was ok for a random guy to smoke pot somehow it wasn’t for Phelps. Presumably because he was a role model which would have the harmful effect of….I know, letting random guys know it’s ok to smoke pot. Hmm.

Does she not realize how many middle- and high-school kids look up to Michael Phelps? That he’s on the front of Wheaties boxes right now? That we all warn our kids about the dangers of drug use? Most parents find that photo sad and disappointing and will use it as a Teachable Moment for teenagers. What Michael Phelps did was a shame, but adults’ defending—and even encouraging—his drug use are far more shameful.

This one just demonstrates the reasons I tend not to convince many people. I just don’t do the whole underhanded shift from, they disagree with me about what is dangerous, to, they must be recklessly encouraging behavior they know is bad. More on this later.

However, this whole situation raises a puzzling issue. If people realize that pot use is actually pretty common, indeed pretty common even in the sort of person they would see as being on the ‘right track’¹, why does opposition to pot remain so strong? I mean one might think that if many of your friends, major political figures you know, famous scientists and Olympian record holders all smoked up why would they think legalizing pot would be a big deal?

The explanation is that we don’t always, or even mostly, go from evidence to conclusion as we pretend it does. Often there is some reason we would like to accept the conclusion so we manufacture a story to tell ourselves about how we are justified in that belief. For instance we all realize that “My parents were catholic” isn’t a valid justification for accepting the doctrine of original sin or salvation by faith and works but yet somehow people who are born to catholic parents are very likely to be catholic and many of them would give you a very different explanation of why they believe in Catholicism rather than Islam. Something very similar goes on when it comes to moral issues in politics.

Most people in our society grow up hearing the message that even occasional pot use in college is some kind of shameful dirty behavior, the sort of thing that people might whisper about many years later. Unlike getting totally smashed on cheap vodka at college parties where, despite it’s danger, people are usually happy to publicly laugh about after graduation most people still don’t want their grandma² knowing they smoked up or even that they are okay with people getting stoned. Therefore when the subject comes up around the family table people have a strong incentive not to voice support for loosening pot laws. Indeed, if you have actually gotten stoned the conversation likely makes you anxious about being found out and the last thing you want to do is to give them cause to suspect you think smoking pot isn’t a big deal. Thus there is a strong pressure to adopt some kind of rationalization which lets you avoid thinking of yourself as a hypocrite without requiring you tell grandma that her worries about pot are overblown. Of course when you get to the age where you are having kids yourself an older sister or a prudish new friend take grandma’s place.

This is where your baby brother (alternatively your child) steps into the equation. You recognize that pot can become a harmful habit for some people. Sure so can WoW but if you buy your baby brother WoW for Christmas no one will view you as foolish and irresponsible for encouraging MMORPG playing. We want other people to think we are responsible and mature so we make sure to make grave sounding statements about the risks of pot, especially if grandma is in the room. Even in private we tend to feel guilty about telling a younger brother it’s ok to go smoke up where we wouldn’t have the slightest qualm about taking him out to get smashed when he turns 21. The harms we do by failing to be sufficiently cautionary are very concrete and those done by going overboard are diffuse and abstract so we are motivated to talk up warnings and dangers.

There are a whole host of ills to be laid at the feet of our CYA approach to giving advice but in the case of drugs it augments the granny factor and hands us a ready made excuse for our hypocrisy. Well sure, the reasoning goes, my friends and I can handle pot fine but people my little brother’s age/son’s age shouldn’t be able to get it. Or if you got stoned at that age you instead substitute a concern about the increased strength of today’s weed or it’s increasing association with hard drugs. Of course in actuality making drugs illegal tends to make them easier for youth to access (drug dealers rarely card) and stronger weed is actually more healthy weed but we aren’t evaluating an argument we are searching for a narrative that makes us the mature and responsible party and avoids a disapproving lecture/look from grandma without forcing us to think we are hypocrites. Once ‘grandma’ becomes on older friend and our little brother is replaced with our daughter it takes incredibly strength of character (or a bunch of hippie friends) not to just go along with the flow and accept this narrative.

Frankly, I’m not sure what can be done about this problem. The baby boomers seem to illustrate the fact that the pressure to conform and be thought well of is so strong that even people who smoked up back in the 60s have become the older generation who disapproves of anyone who is foolish enough to suggest to youth that pot smoking isn’t a big deal. I fear it is a stable equilibrium.