4A - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com E-MAIL CHRISTINA AT CHSUHI@UMICH.EDU bE itd tan4 0a4J Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. S'I420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@umich.edu CHRISTINA SUH 6 6 JACOB SMILOVITZ EDITOR IN CHIEF RACHEL VAN GILDER EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR MATT AARONSON MANAGING EDITOR e-5 s 40 crsLA 20'Lt-> federal t^ M(o vem ent)Fo rwardfor LGB'I-"T Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. A wasteful crime States should legalize recreational marijuana use California voters have the chance to make history in November. If passed, a recently created ballot initiative in California would make the state the first to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. The initiative would create a legal market for marijuana that would provide revenue to a debt- ridden state, develop a new sector for employment and allow law enforcement to put a better focus on violent crimes. California voters should pass the initiative and Michigan, along with the rest of the nation, should follow suit and legalize recreational marijuana use. 0 The Tax, Regulate and Control Canna- bis Act of 2010 - which is sponsored by Oaksterdam University, a cannabis col- lege in Oakland, California - would allow those over 21 to possess up to one ounce and grow a maximum of 25 square feet of marijuana. The initiative received nearly 700,000 signatures, clearly surpassing the 433,971 it needed to be placed on the Cali- fornia ballot in November. Decriminalizing marijuana would lead to immediate benefits for California. Cur- rent marijuana laws lead to waste of money and time pursuing, processing and impris- oning recreational marijuana users. If the initiative were to be passed, California could save about $200 million according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML, for short) - and law enforcement could concentrate on apprehending violent crime offenders. California could also increase its rev- enue by legalizing recreational marijuana use. Marijuana taxes that could be enacted if the drug was legal would generate about $1.4 billion each year, according to Cali- fornia's tax regulator, the Board of Equal- ization. The money could be reallocated to services like health care, education or transportation. And legal marijuana use would create a lucrative industry that could generate thousands of jobs. According to the Cali- fornia BOE, a legal market for marijua- na could become a $14-billion-per-year industry. This is only amplified by the $12 to $18 billion per year that NORML esti- mates industries related to recreational marijuana would make. NORML also esti- mates that a marijuana industry could cre- ate between 60,000 and 110,000 new jobs each year. But California isn't the only state that would benefit from legalizing recreation- al marijuana - Michigan could also reap the rewards. Michigan has a 14.1-percent unemployment rate as of February, accord- ing to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and its average debt is high. The state could certainly profit from increased rev- enue and jobs created by a new industry. And according to the State of Michigan House Fiscal Agency, Michigan spent $38,012,000 on punishment of marijuana infractions in 2007, the most recent fig- ures available. That excessive expenditure could be eliminated. A profitable marijua- na industry would help pull Michigan out of its current economic slump. If California passes the Tax, Regulate and Control Cannabis Act of 2010, it would create a successful model of legal marijua- na use that provides fiscal and public safe- ty benefits that could be followed by other states including Michigan. California should pass the ballot initiative legalizing recreational marijuana use in November, and Michigan should follow its example. n Sunday, I sat down with .3Michigan Student Assembly President Chris Armstrong, who was sworn in as the assem- bly's new leader last night. My primary purpose wasn't to focus on his successful , campaign or his vision for MSA. Rather, I wanted to discuss topics TOMMASO that have receivedP little attention in PAVONE the past several weeks: his coming out experience, the role that his sex- ual identity has played in his life and his perspective on the significance of becoming the first openly gay MSA President. Because despite a lack of coverage regarding Armstrong's sexu- ality, it's a really big deal. What I foresaw as a formal inter- view with Armstrong actually turned into a fantastic chat about his life. We climbed to the 3rd floor of the Michi- gan Union and, quite appropriately, conducted the interview just a few feet away from the Spectrum Center. My first impression of Armstrong was of a distinctly energetic and positive individual. Despite a pouring rain outside creating a somewhat somber atmosphere, Armstrong was smiling, laughing and passionately opening up about some of the most personal aspects of his life. He described the emotional expe- rience of coming out to his parents at the young age of fifteen and the importance of their being support- ive regarding his sexuality. He told me about his first relationship early in high school, which occurred years before Armstrong came out to his friends. And he shared that it wasn't until he came to the University that he fully embraced his sexual- ity. "Being openly gay, for me, is one of the most salient identities that I have," he said. "I am inherently tied to all other gay men on this campus, even if I've not met them." Armstrong's solidarity stems from the support that the Univer- sity's LGBT community offered him in his personal development. "If it weren't for all of them," Armstrong explained, "I would have never been in the position that I was." He says a major motive to run for president was to show younger members of the LGBT commission that a gay man could become president of MSA. Upon accomplishing this goal and learning that he had been elected MSA presi- dent, Armstrong says he felt "com- pletely overwhelmed." It took some time for the significance of his victory to sink in. "I don't think at that time I reallythought... I'm gay and I won," he explained. "I don't think I really real- ized it until the next day." Clearly, Armstrong understands, that the significance of his election cannot be overstated. Symbolically, his landslide victory is a testament to the University's ability to promote diversity and support social justice. At a more practical level, Armstrong's sexuality and involvement in the LGBT Commission is sure to shape the way he approaches his role as MSA president. "You need to understand and be intimately involved in all these different communities so that you can better make decisions on behalf of the student body," he said. I could have asked Armstrong a thousand follow-up questions while admiring his positive attitude and disarming smile, but unfortunately he was already 10 minutes late for a study group meeting. I took pity upon him and let him go. And, as I left the Union under the falling rain, I realized that I was smilingnow as well. I was smiling because I recognized that Armstrong had run for all the right reasons. I was smiling because his passion for LGBT rights was evident, his determination to improve MSA was crystal clear and his humility in the face of his election victory was striking. Armstrong is intelligent, thoughtful, passionate and determined. But most of all, his ability to overcome adversity shows that he is also fierce. Very fierce. Armstrong's win is a big deal for the gay communi You may have not supported MFor- ward or Armstrong's candidacy. You may have abstained from voting in the MSA elections: You may not even know what purpose MSA serves. But what everyone should recognize is that Arm- strong's election is an important mile- stone in the history of this University. Two years after this country elected the first African-American president, as University students, we have played our role and elected an openly gay president to lead MSA.We've made our little mark in the continuing quest for civil rights and equality. I ended my interview by ask- ing Armstrong if he wished to share something about himself with the student body. "Well, hopefully after this article they'll know I'm gay," he laughed. "It makes the significance real." This was, indeed, my initial purpose for writing this article. As someone who identifies as gay, I wanted to emphasize the symbolism and importance of Armstrong's vic- tory. But after meeting Armstrong, I realized there was a stronger message I wanted to convey: You don't have to be gay, lesbian or transgender to be proud of your new MSA president. - Tommaso Pavone can be reached at tpavone@umich.edu. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS: Nina Amilineni, Jordan Birnholtz, William Butler, Nicholas Clift, Michelle DeWitt, Brian Flaherty, Jeremy Levy, Erika Mayer, Edward McPhee, Emily Orley, Harsha Panduranga, Alex Schiff, Asa Smith, Brittany Smith, Robert Soave,,Radhika Upadhyaya, Laura Veith EILEEN STAHL Capitalism -.on cannabis LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor. Letters should be fewer than 300 words and must include the writer's full name and University affiliation. All submissions become property of the Daily. We do not print anonymous letters. Send letters to tothedaily@umich.edu. NOEL GORDON Encouraging debate isn't bigotry 4 4 With everyone - from presidents to your arthritic grandma - smoking weed, we've got a lot of people talking about legalization. There's some logic behind this.Weed doesn't cause near- ly as much harm as tobacco or alcohol, for exam- ple. Come on now, you're not going to see a kid in the emergency room for cannabis poisoning. Many think a good strategy would be to intro- duce marijuana into the marketplace and tax the hell out of it for a much-needed economic boost. But as nice as the idea sounds at first, it's the last thing even the most committed stoner needs. See, corporations these days are trying to entertain us with the most asinine and vulgar crap they can get away with. Take video games where you run around shooting prostitutes in their jiggling ass-cheeks, or movies produced by anyone whose name rhymes with "Cycle Flay" or "Cherry Shmuckprimer." These are fun ways to get intouch with the grunting ape- creature in all of us, but if they were the only things we absorbed through culture we'd be back to clubbing people over the head and root- ing through their loincloths for flint. Thank- fully, most of us can only be shovel-fed shit for so long before we realize what it tastes like and wander off to do something marginally more productive for a while. But consider that one of the major side- effects of cannabis is that it makes everything highly entertaining for unusually long stretch- es of time. For example, I once watched some clearly stoned frat boys laugh hysterically at "Golden Girls" for the better part of four hours. And they were just watching the DVD menu. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Once corporations get ahold of marijuana, it won't be long before they're marketing it relentlessly with all of their brain-slaughtering entertain- ment, leaving all who succumb ditheringly receptive to any crap chucked their way. I'm thinking this is going to be especially awful when applied to reality TV shows. I can hear the ads: "If you're somehow not entertained by watching a silicone-injected harpy shrilly accusing the token gay guy of being 'fake,' you aren't getting the full cannaboid experience!!" Maybe they'll make a whole new channel called Weed TV. The entire lineup would consist of videos of cats with their mouths crudely ani- mated to lip-sync along with hip-hop tracks. And you know they're only going to play shitty backpacker rap and hip hop. Millions of hours of national productivity may go down the toilet, but the silver lining is that corporate advertising for weed is going to be hilarious. I'm picturing a sexy model Photo- shopped to have bloodshot eyes and a negative body mass index, rocking some hemp linge- rie and straddling a pizza box. Or maybe the quintessential polo shirt-clad Upper Middle Class White People Family, prancing merrily out of their giant three-story house (that no Americans actually have anymore unless they live in a television commercial) and chortling fondly with one another as Junior lights up a big fat blunt with the faces of all of his favorite Disney friends on it! I hope this sounds entertaining to you, because if marijuana is legalized we'll be gag- ging on clouds of this crap. And let me let you in on a little secret: THC, the chemical that cre- ates the high in cannabis, stays in your fat cells for a while. If you don't use it often, it's not a big deal, but if you do more than about once a week it starts building up, dampening the high. That means you have to use more and more to achieve the same effect, which means you start spending exponentially more money. Isn't that great? The more we buy, the more we'll need to buy. Business loves shit like that! It's been demonstrated that sugar creates essentially the same addiction patterns, so now we've got 16 sugar cubes per can of coke and "medium" soft drinks at Burger King contain- ing roughly the same amount of liquid as the Marianas Trench. I can just imagine walking into "Transformers IV: This Time No Fucking Robots at All" and being assailed by glittering displays reminding me to pick up my duffle bag full of drugs at the concession stand. Just stuff more and more of it into our systems so we keep buying it in larger helpings and eventu- ally we'll be so brain-dead we might actually start caring about Shia LeBeouf. Am I overreacting? Maybe. But thinking up elaborate scenarios to panic about is the sec- ond easiest way to waste spare time. Eileen Stahl is an LSA senior. During the latter half of the 19th century, American physician and natural scientist Samuel George Mor- ton claimed that Caucasians were the most intelligent race based on skull size and capacity. Robert Bean, fol- lowing up on the work of Morton, asserted that Ameri- can blacks were less intelligent than American whites because of inherent biological factors dependent largely again on brain size. Both men were widely respected for their scholarly research. Both men were also undoubtedly wrong. Instead of accepting this fallacious idea of racial superiority or, even worse, ignoring it, scientists like S. J. Gould directly challenged Morton and Bean's hypotheses and eventually proved them wrong. On Mar. 18, the American Movement for Israel, the Michigan Political Union and several other student groups brought their own Samuel Morton or George Bean to campus - Dr. Raphael Israeli. Israeli is a Chinese and Middle Eastern history scholar at Hebrew University. The professor spoke about China's global rise in the inter- national community and its impact on the Middle East. In response, three University students decided to express their right to openly criticize the co-sponsors of the event in a viewpoint published in the Daily (Stop bigotry in Mid- dle East debate, 03/19/2010). The students argued, among other things, that "while Israeli's ideas shouldn't be censored, an explicit distinc- tion should have been made between presenting his scholarship and endorsing his politics. Bringing Israeli to campus but failing to make this distinction constitutes an implicit endorsement of his anti-Muslim views." Here, it is beholden of me to invoke former U.S. Senator David Patrick Moynihan's popular saying that a person is enti- tled to his or her own opinion but not his or her own facts. The MPU doesn't endorse Israeli's views on Muslims and their supposed inability to integrate into western societies. In fact, we vehemently reject his argument. The MPU doesn't believe that race or in this case religion can be attributed to biological factors. However, Israeli shouldn't be completely vilified because one of his views is unsound. Israeli is a noted scholar on China and the Middle East. Even the authors of the viewpoint conceded this point in saying that, "we aren't necessarily challenging the validity of Israeli's scholarship on China and the Middle East." It was because MPU agreed with its critics that we issued a statement of impartiality on our Facebook page and website in which we explicitly stated that we didn't support Israeli's views on Muslims or Islam. Rather, we were dedicated to the advancement of his scholarship regarding China.and the Middle East. This distinction was reiterated at the actual event before Israeli took the podium. The authors of the viewpoints also devised a thought experiment in which they argued that had Israeli been "a white supremacist, anti-Semite or homophobe," public reaction would have been different. And that "this dis- turbing double standard of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable bigotry on campus needs to be re-examined by student organizations looking to present diverse per- spectives through the speakers they bring." As a homosexual African-American man, I find their thought experiment and its implications ludicrous and, more importantly, offensive. Had Israeli been a speaker who argued that homosexuals, African Americans or Jews were inherently incapable of assimilating into west- ern societies, I would have still invited him to lecture had he been able to contribute something meaningful to a conversation (as Israeli did on China and the Middle East). I wouldn't have acted any differently in the way I handled the two situations. I would have denounced the hypothetical speaker's views on gays or blacks as falla- cious and made the clear distinction that MPU didn't sup- port them. Moreover, the case of reggae artist Buju Banton is not equitable to this situation. Banton isn't a scholar, wasn't invited by a student organization and explicitly calls for the pouring of acid in the eyes of gay people. MPU stands behind its decision to co-sponsor the Israeli event. Israeli gave a thought-provoking lecture on China and the Middle East: nothing more, nothing less. Even more importantly, the MPU will continue to be open to all opinions on the ideological spectrum; con- tinue to denounce any speech that incites violence against a particular group; continue to work with groups from all faiths, political orientations, sexual orientations, gender, class and race to raise awareness; and continue to foster intelligent political discourse on campus. It is our sincere belief that the best way to confront prejudice and discrimination is directly. It is only by chal- lenging biased viewpoints and dismantling them that we can hope to build a world that values all peoples for their unique, individual differences. Noel Gordon is the president of the Michigan Political Union. The Daily is looking for diverse, passionate, strong student writers to join the Editorial Board. Editorial Board members are responsible for discussing and writing the editorials that appear on the left side of the opinion page. E-MAIL RACHEL VAN GILDER AT RACHELVG@UMICH.EDU FOR MORE INFORMATION.