Opinion: The university’s missed opportunity


The University of Colorado, in what has been argued to be a possible violation of the First Amendment, successfully closed off its Boulder campus on 4/20 to prevent what have been for the most part peaceful assemblies. The explanations varied from concerns about CU’s reputation to worries about disruption to the academic process. Per the insignias on the car doors, apparently police from as far away as Jefferson and Adams counties helped keep the pot-smokers at bay.
Now the CU regents and administration will have to do the same every year, or risk looking foolish, at least until pot is legalized. (Whether cops from across the Metro area will continue to be willing to participate is another matter.) The War on Drugs is widely acknowledged to be a failure, and our prisons are filled with users and pushers, supporting the emerging business of private for-profit incarceration. We should have learned from Prohibition and cigarettes; for the most part, it’s better to regulate, discourage, and tax than to criminalize people’s attachments/addictions to consciousness-altering substances.
A contrasting discussion is occurring as to whether it is legal and acceptable for 21 year-old students to have guns in their dorm rooms, where, unless CU is ready to install safes in the rooms, the guns will be accessible to other students, who may be drunk or stoned, or simply young and immature. 
Apparently, Second Amendment “rights” are more sacrosanct than those of the First. I use quotes on “rights” because the militia clause in this amendment has been ignored so long that people think it is irrelevant. Perhaps Congress should mandate that all states form militias, with able-bodied adults required to keep M-16s in their closets, like the Swiss. Maybe then the Supreme Court would properly address the complete language (and, as a side benefit, provide a rationale for the couple I saw walk out of a gun show a few years ago with his-and-hers Colt AR-15s.)
According to the newspapers, the judge said that CU is well within its rights to regulate the campus on 4/20. “Why doesn’t CU have the right to say, ‘We don’t want to pay $60,000 a year for this?’ ” he said. “Why don’t they have the right to say, ‘We’re tired of this?'” Well, if that’s all it took, then any government could claim cost or fatigue, and throw the First Amendment right of assembly out the window. (To be fair to the judge, the hearing was last moment, and there was little time to consider all the legal niceties.)
This type of value-laden argument reminded me of Supreme Court justice Scalia’s remark about forcing people to buy health insurance versus broccoli. The obvious rejoinder is that the health care bill could alternatively have said that you must pay a fee to cover the cost of insurance (whether government-run or voucher based), or purchase insurance on your own. Clearly the government has adequate coercive powers: it can put us into debt to pay for wars and other actions with which we don’t agree, force us to subsidize businesses which we think pollute or act unethically, or draft us into the military to get killed. And the government has been requiring us all to pay for Medicare for decades.
CU could have promoted the Wyclef Jean concert as its 4/20 event as an opportunity for legalization supporters to gather, and put it on outdoors (with port-a-potties) or in the Stadium, without the requirement that Jean not speak about pot, and without shutting down the campus other than the Norlin Quad. CU could have pushed the idea of other schools doing their own 4/20 events so as to limit the flow into Boulder. All of this would have been more forward-looking, less threatening, almost certainly much cheaper, and people would have had easy access to toilets, solving another of CU’s gripes. Local restaurant owners would likely have gotten behind it; after all, pot smoking is notorious for making you hungry.
Such a move would have been consistent with what has happened in Boulder in the past, like with the Halloween Mall Crawl, where by a sustained effort over years, the energy was channeled into something better for everyone.


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