Economist Supports Sarah Palin’s ‘Semi-Deliberate Incoherent’ Position On Marijuana

It’s not every day one expects to read the Economist endorsing Sarah Palin on….well anything. But that is just what they have done in a recent blog post regarding Palin (and the Obama administration’s), policy on the criminalization of marijuana. Turns out being “semi-deliberately incoherent’ when it comes to a drug policy is just the sort of thing the Economist can get on board with:

So apparently, the Netherlands, Denmark, and so forth are among the countries [including the U.S.] that court public contempt for the law and repressive police practices by keeping marijuana use illegal but unpunished in practice. And yet these countries have failed to turn into Russia. I think what we’re seeing here is the importance of national political culture and the impact of all the other institutions countries have that shape their practices of governance. It would be nice if we could arrive at an ethically and logically consistent legal stance on drug use, but it may be that in practice that’s very hard to do, and not actually very important. Basically, while Sarah Palin’s position on this issue, as on many others, is semi-deliberately incoherent, it is in this case a semi-deliberate incoherence that has proven to be effective policy in many countries, and I’m not even sure it’s the wrong stance on the issue.

Altogether, I think this fairly accurately represents the term ‘strange bedfellows.’

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