I recently moved back to my hometown of Naperville, IL and since I’ve moved back the town has been in the throes of a heated conversation about recreational marijuana.
The Illinois legislature approved the sale of recreational marijuana that becomes effective January 1, 2020. While the law allows recreational marijuana, it allows local municipalities the ability to prohibit the selling of recreational marijuana; this is known as opting-in and opting-out respectively. And here is where the rhetorical issues start to emerge.
Yard signs, and Nextdoor posts, are popping up encouraging residents to tell the Naperville City Council to Opt Out. Most of these posts and signs invoke it being better for the children and so that Naperville’s prestigious rankings in various click-bait lists does not go down.
To me, this reaction and how visceral it is for people in Naperville is very pearl clutching and is right out of Reefer Madness. The problem is that opting out does not make marijuana go away; one can just go to the next municipality and purchase marijuana there. With this kind of whack-a-mole problem voters should be upset at the legislature, not the city council.
The fact is that marijuana and other, more illicit drugs are already in our community. Alcohol and gambling are vices and are easily available at nearly every corner store here, and are equally if not more destructive than marijuana.
As Illinois considers casino expansion, I doubt there will be the outrage on the level Naperville is dealing with allowing recreational marijuana sales, because casinos are preceded with promises of jobs and tax boosts, which are all fallacies, as gambling is a regressive tax and is much more destructive to individuals than marijuana ever will be.
A broader issue here is that a lot of the information that people receive about drugs is driven by police on the news. Citations Needed did an excellent episode on this, but as long as we have stories in the media driven by police ride alongs and continue posting mugshots for possession, the conversation is going to continue to be a “a feedback loop of a police and federal government determined to keep the War on Drugs in their own domain, shaping a media narrative that manufactures and manipulates the public’s and lawmakers’ perception of drugs and drug-related crime.”
On a personal note, I’m disappointed that my church, a Methodist church, gave city council member Patty Gustin, unannounced time at the pulpit this morning to espouse lies about marijuana. She brought out the usual line about how “this isn’t your mother’s marjiuana.” I’m frustrated when baby boomers like Gustin make it sound like it was OK for them to use drugs back in the day, but now things are different, so other generations shouldn’t partake. The fact is this is a trope that’s long been debunked.
Then she encouraged the congregation to go to the upcoming city council meeting and let their voices be heard, but ended by telling them to Opt Out.
As a Methodist, I’m pissed. My church did not take a stance from the pulpit during the slow motion schism we’re currently undergoing and now we’re giving time to city council members. I understand why the church would be in favor of opting-out, but this is out of character. The ministers did some both-sides-ing around the conversation of the church splitting. I’m confused why the pastors couldn’t take a stance from the pulpit on loving and accepting everyone – which seems both Christian and moral – but instead they can take a stance on the sale of recreational marijuana, not even the use. As a congregation we do need to be engaged with local leadership, but what happened came across as didactic and wrong.