America’s paper of record gets on board with repealing cannabis prohibition.

Dropping “a bomb on our country’s disastrous war on marijuana with unprecedented force,” The New York Times last month launched last month High Time: An Editorial Series on Marijuana Legalization, a seven-parter that puts the paper squarely – I believe – on the right side of history on this issue. Citing “vast social costs,” “racist results,” and “overwhelming evidence that addiction and dependence are relatively minor problems,” The Times’ editorial board advocated a repeal of the nation’s cannabis prohibition.

Last November, The Nation went all-in on marijuana-law reform with our “Dope and Change” issue. I wrote, “If Congress wants to enjoy a popularity as high as marijuana’s, it might consider revisiting pot’s federal prohibition.” The blanket federal ban is unworkable on many levels, not least of which is the capriciousness of its enforcement: Given the crazy-quilt of state and local medicinal and decriminalization laws, the actual prohibition of marijuana in this country comes down to, as The Times puts it, “the whims of whoever happens to be in the White House and chooses to enforce or not enforce the federal law.” Needless to say, this type of jurisprudence is not just; Harry Levine reported in “Dope and Change” that since 1997 in New York City, 87 percent of NYPD’s 600,000 marijuana-possession arrests were of blacks and Latinos.

“The problem that prohibition advocates have,” writes Paul Waldman at The American Prospect, “is that so much of their rhetoric hasn’t changed in decades, steeped in culture war resentments and reliant on fear-mongering.” A 2008 article on AlterNet.org illustrates that twentieth-century drug prohibition was born in places where white minorities ruled over non-white majorities before becoming a xenophobic tool of law enforcement in places with white majorities.

An examination into the whys and wherefores of our broken cannabis policy is well overdue. American pot prohibition ought to be seen as a cautionary tale of what happens when we create policy based not on appropriately reasoned ideas, but rather on fear, racism, and the sensational-but-unfounded caterwauling of policymakers and think-tankers who should know better.

If American drug prohibition laws were enacted in the service of furthering discrimination, then you’d have to say – based on the arrest and incarceration numbers – they’ve been a smashing success. But as far as advancing public health goes… well, they’re a disaster.

At a time when governmental dysfunction is so prevalent and the demand for Congressional action is high, we need to be aware of the real motives we’re asking our elected officials to promote.

With marijuana, bigotry-based policy has delivered a nearly 100-year-long quagmire from which we’re only beginning to extricate ourselves with fact-based debate and informed dissent.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL is the editor and publisher of The Nation.