Why Can't We Admit Policy Mistakes?

• Author: Rowland, Tim
• Position: FINAL WORD

Every so often, usually in a backwater weekly newspaper, you can still find what was once a ubiquitous newspaper feature known as the police blotter. It is a dutiful, verbatim digest of business that recently came across the police desk. Often sad and occasionally humorous, it records every last disturbance, from a drugstore shoplifting to a rat in a toilet.

The blotter is often a nonlethal version of the Darwin Awards. If I had to pick a favorite item from my years in newspapers, it was the car thief in Key West who hotwired a jalopy and sped away. Sadly for him, the only road out of town was the 113-mile-long Overseas Highway, a corridor from which there is no exit. In no particular hurry, the police radioed ahead to the community of Islamorada, 84 miles to the east, and asked the police chief there to please nab the thief when he happened by. Which, an hour and 45 minutes later, he did.

The blotter can be viewed as a leading social and cultural indicator. Have opioids infected the community? Are economic stresses causing increased incidences of domestic abuse? Do unsupervised juveniles suggest fractured families?

But the failures revealed in the blotter do not always lie with the perp. Vestiges of failed law and government behavioral modification show up as well.

Two blotter items published in northern New York earlier this year, when the roads were awash in salt and slush, show how desperately we cling to such policies. In each item, a driver was pulled over on the pretense that his license plates were unreadable--which they probably were, along with every other car traveling the Northway that day. In each case, the ostensible safety stop resulted in a charge of possession of a small amount of marijuana.

One man, an executive of color from the Bronx, was driving a newly minted Range Rover. The other was an unemployed 42-year-old who was driving an old beater of a Volvo.

Their commonality, along with an affinity for weed, is the misfortune of being tagged for violating a law that in another year very well might not exist. Reflecting on the Catholic Church's decision to permanently absolve the sin of Friday meat consumption, George Carlin quipped, "I bet there are still some guys in hell doing time on a meat rap." And so it will be for these two.

Like too many laws, marijuana was criminalized without any study, without any science, without any scintilla of evidence that the common good would be improved were it to be scoured from the face...