Casinos, Pot and the Quest For Consistency

By Ross Douthat
The New York Times, The Opinion Pages

My Sunday column on “pot and jackpots” — that is, the march toward marijuana legalization and the spread of casino gambling — tried to widen the usual culture-war frame to encompass not just bedroom-and-altar hot buttons, but the way the broader logic of “consenting adults” is working itself out in other areas of American life. One point I didn’t get to, though, is the extent to which both of these issues, pot and gambling, illustrate what one might call the rationalizing impulse in modern American politics, which seeks perfect fairness and consistency at the expense of compromises rooted in the accidents of history, and which makes it hard for conservatives to defend older, inherently-arbitrary arrangements even when they make practical sense.

Consider casinos, for instance. Was there any deep principle behind the old, pre-1990s dispensation, in which New Jersey and Nevada essentially served as the country’s designated outlets for the deep-seated urge to risk your money at lousy odds while a sleepless waitress refills your drinks? If such a principle existed, it wasn’t exactly obvious, and had I grown up in the general vicinity of Atlantic City or Reno I probably would have resented the set of accidents that turned my native city into the place where everybody else came to party, act out, occasionally ruin their own lives or their families, and despoil a community where they didn’t have to live. If casino gambling is socially destructive enough to be basically illegal in 48 states, I might would have thought, then why not in all 50? Or alternatively, if it’s okay for Nevadans to build gambling palaces, then why shouldn’t it be okay for Minnesotans or Vermonters or Oklahomans as well? If there’s a right to gamble, why shouldn’t it apply everywhere — and if casinos come with social costs, why not do the fair thing and spread those costs around?

So too, in a slightly different way, with the longstanding prohibition on marijuana. As advocates for legalizing pot have long protested, there’s no obviously compelling reason besides the quirks of history and culture that clearly justifies making alcohol a normal part of respectable socializing, while consigning weed to the extralegal fringe. If I prefer a toke to a drink, why should the law draw some spurious, culturally contingent distinction that makes my preference criminal, and consigns dealers to prison while bartenders walk free? If we restrict substances that can damage their users, why not do the fair thing and make the restrictions uniform?

The answer is … well, the answer in both cases is essentially contingent, historicist, tradition-minded. We have these inherited limits — geographic, legal — on certain vices, certain self-destructive activities. They are inherently arbitrary, yes — but they also may do useful work regulating how easily and casually and frequently people indulge in those vices, and they may strike a balance between puritanism and permissiveness that’s socially useful even if isn’t perfectly consistent or obviously fair. Whereas making consistency our north star requires either accepting an unsustainable level of repression (adding a reboot of Prohibition to the War on Drugs, say, or telling Americans that Vegas is closed and they have to fly to the Caribbean for those kind of thrills) or a damaging level of permissiveness … with the latter, quite possibly, being what we’re headed for today.

We’re headed there because these kind of tradition-based arguments don’t satisfy the modern mind, but also because in a society that doesn’t put much stock in arguments from tradition it’s hard to go just part of the way on a given social question and then stop. With casino gambling, for instance, I don’t think the “Indian tribe carveout” that brought casinos to a lot of states in the Clinton era was necessarily a good idea, but I could imagine someone arguing that it offered a better balance between restriction and release than the Atlantic City/Vegas model. But whether it was better or not, it was seemingly foredoomed to be temporary: Once the old taboos were broken and the process got started, there was no obvious stopping place, no obvious reason why states that had already conceded on the principle of welcoming casinos wouldn’t want to claim a large piece of the action for themselves. And that’s how we’ve ended up, not with the modest expansion of casino gambling that the reservation model seemed to promise, but with a race to the bottom by income-hungry states.

With marijuana, as I said in the column, I’m a lot more sympathetic to the steps toward decriminalization that have been taken to date, because I think the strict-prohibition model has been a pretty clear policy failure, with too many attendant injustices, in a way that the “only in Vegas” model of casino policy was not. But I also worry that we’re basically in the “only on Indian reservations” stage of the progression with pot, and that in a generation or so we’ll have passed from the plausible way station of decriminalization to the logical endpoint of full commercial legalization, because nobody will be able to adequately explain in principle why using a drug should be legal but turning a profit off it (with the attendant bounty of tax dollars for the state) should not. If I were confident that this process would be managed by, say, a wise policy mind like Mark Kleiman, who favors allowing small-scale production and distribution while maintaining a ban on commercial production, I would feel better about where we’re headed. But the Kleiman stopping point, however practically desirable, has some of the same arbitrariness problems as the old regime, and the logic of full legalization just seems like it may prove too powerful for a permissively-inclined, fairness-oriented, consistency-seeking society to resist.

Pot and Jackpots

By Ross Douthat
The New York Times

BASED on what stirs passions and wins headlines, it would be easy to imagine that the only cultural debates that matter in America are the ones that have to do with sex. 

There are good reasons for our intimate obsession: Desire is intertwined with identity, sex conceives the human future, the family is the place where all our ladders start. But to understand America’s changing cultural landscape, sometimes a wider lens is useful — because the same trends that have altered the way we think about sex and reproduction have wider repercussions as well. 

Consider two issues: casino gambling and marijuana. We’re used to the idea that attitudes on a controversy like gay marriage have changed with unprecedented speed. But both casinos and pot have gone mainstream over the last generation at a similarly remarkable pace. 

In 1990, casino gambling was still concentrated in Nevada and Atlantic City. Then came the rise of Indian-reservation gambling; then came casinos with no tribal fig leaf. Today 23 states have commercial casinos, and the old model of casino-going as a what-happens-in-Vegas excursion has given way to casino-going as routine entertainment. 

“In the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states,” a report from the Institute for American Values noted this year, “nearly every adult now lives within a short drive of a casino.” And after this Tuesday, that drive may get considerably shorter, because New York voters are expected to ratify a constitutional amendment allowing up to seven more casinos in the state. 

The marijuana revolution is arguably not so far advanced, since only two states, Washington and Colorado, are experimenting with outright legalization. But more such experiments are expected to follow soon, and medicinal marijuana is already available in 20 states. Meanwhile, public opinion on the issue has shifted about as fast as it has on gay marriage — from 32 percent support for legalization in 2002 to 58 percent in the latest Gallup poll. 

There are significant differences in the ways gambling and pot have won America. The spread of casinos has been more of a top-down phenomenon, driven by states seeking revenue and an industry that’s free with campaign contributions. The permissive turn on marijuana has been a more (if you will) grass-roots affair — driven by activists and artists, influenced by empathy for the terminally ill, and hastened by public exhaustion with the drug war. 

But both have been made possible by the same trend in American attitudes: the rise of a live-and-let-live social libertarianism, the weakening influence of both religious conservatism and liberal communitarianism, the growing suspicion of moralism in public policy. 

And both, in different ways, illustrate the potential problems facing a culture pervaded by what the late sociologist Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism” and allergic to any restrictions on what individuals choose to do. 

This is clearer in the case of casinos, whose consequences for the common good are straightforwardly disastrous. As the Institute for American Values report points out, the alliance of state governments and gambling interests is essentially exploitative, and the tax revenue casinos supply comes at the expense of long-term social welfare. Casinos tend to lower property values and weaken social capital in the places where they’re planted, they’re more likely to extract dollars from distressed communities than to spur economic development, and their presence is a disaster for the reckless and the addiction-prone. 

Pot is a more complicated issue, given its essential harmlessness for many users and the crying need to lock up fewer Americans for nonviolent offenses. But one can support decriminalizing marijuana possession, as many states have done, while still doubting the prudence of legalizing (and, of course, taxing) its open manufacture and sale. 

Whatever benefits legalization brings with it, it will almost certainly increase marijuana use, which has already risen sharply in the last decade. And as purely recreational as a joint may be for casual tokers, steady use isn’t always so harmless: it can limit educational attainment, and with it economic mobility, to an extent that mirrors the impact of growing up in a single-parent home. 

Perhaps these costs are just the price we pay for liberty, in the same way that certain social liberals and libertarians regard the costs of family breakdown as a price worth paying for emancipation from sexual repression. 

But liberals especially, given their anxieties about inequality, should be attuned to the way that some liberties can grease the skids for exploitation, with a revenue-hungry state partnering with the private sector to profiteer off human weakness. 

This is one reason previous societies made distinctions between liberty and license that we have become loath to draw — because what seems like a harmless pleasure to the comfortable can devastate the poor and weak. 

Or else, with pot and slots no less than bread and circuses, it can simply distract their minds, dull their senses and make them easier to rule.