A reader writes:

A police officer friend of mine once pointed out something essential about the role marijuana plays in the War on Drugs: from a law enforcement perspective, it's easy. Marijuana use is incredibly widespread, particularly among certain predictable populations, like college kids. Because it's not a hard drug, marijuana users, most of whom are a lot like Phelps (smart, hard working, young - not "addicts") are far less likely than other drug users to carry a weapon or get violent with an officer. While marijuana growers tend to be less "average" than your average pot smoker (more likely to have a weapon around, for instance, to protect their crop), they are still less organized and violent than traffickers of heroin, crack, etc.

Cops are under constant pressure to keep their numbers up. That's how they prove their efficacy to their bosses, and its how their bosses get money from their bosses (again, this is my friend's theory, but obviously I could have picked that tidbit up from The Wire). Busting college kids for holding weed and taking down grow houses is a terrific way to keep these numbers up. Drug arrests always look better than traffic stops on your report. And drug seizures are viewed particularly favorably. But going after junkies and heroin dealers is a lot more dangerous than trying to take down the marijuana trade.

So from the perspective of law enforcement, illegal marijuana provides a perfectly balanced way for them to prosecute the War on Drugs. Weed is harmless enough to be widely used (since, unlike say heroin, it won't kill you), which provides cops with plenty of potential arrests. But again, because its so widely used, especially among the young, no amount of crack downs is going to get rid of weed in our society. So it's a well that never goes dry. And it's a win-win on the PR end: every marijuana bust can be used as both evidence of a problem, and evidence that law enforcement is confronting that problem. Perfect.

Of course, having said that, I have to confess my own bias against the ganga: a [former] boyfriend once ditched me on my birthday to smoke up on a friend's couch. So the commercials are right; weed really does destroy your personal relationships.

Or maybe that guy was just an asshole. Hard to say.