As a graduating senior this spring, I feel a certain moral imperative to discuss some of the pressing issues that I see most often threaten the quality of life of our Pepperdine posterity. Now, readers, when I survey the current political landscape, no terror keeps me awake at night like the recent legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington. My deepest fear is that our sweet state of California could be the next to fall. In 2014, the dark, looming cloud of cannabis prohibition repeal might sweep onto the ballot. Pepperdine, we have to prepare ourselves now. How do we go about shaping university policy on an issue as unseemly and unthinkable as marijuana legalization?
Imagine a statewide repeal of marijuana’s illegal status. How do we square a so-called civil liberty with the Christian values that shape the ethos and integrity of our university? I took to the Holy Scriptures for a starting point from which to frame an injunction on letting Pepperdiners smoke the reefer. 1 Corinthians 6 seems to indicate that our body is a temple, and that as such, any sort of inebriating substance would be morally impermissible. So there it is, Pepperdine. Regardless of one’s legal right to possess and consume x amount of marijuana, as a private university, we could enforce our scriptural prescription to abstain from cannabis.
But for fear of a lazy hermeneutical standard, I flipped through the book of Acts for a second opinion, and what did I find? Apparently, this pretty decent guy, Stephen, got totally stoned. I even chalked the issue up as a scriptural stalemate until my Old Testament professor was telling me about these three guys Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who were completely baked on the job (Abednego actually translates to “Bong-rip” in the original Hebrew). And I couldn’t even get through the first five chapters of Revelation without feeling a bit doped up myself.
So without a scripturally authoritative policy in hand, we might have to fight dirty with these pot-loving hippies. Recall the recent strategy Pepperdine has adopted to get a handle on cigarette smokers. Want to reduce the amount of smokers on campus? The solution is simple. Limit their space to a 6’ by 10’ box in the parking lot where cigarette smokers are free to roam around, exercising their right to smoke wherever they want within a sixty square foot designated area of shame.
So it’s 2014 and weed is a legal substance — we just throw up another one of these greenhouses catty-cornered to “smoker jail” and let the herbally inclined hotbox a few square feet of Smother’s lot on their ten minute break between Wonderfully-Made Convo and Differential Equations. Slowly, but surely, we are reducing the number of cigarette smokers on campus. In the same way, we could steadily eliminate all the freeloadin’ stoners on campus. And then eventually, one day, we won’t even have any students left to cause these problems in the first place.
For a minute, try to conceive of our future alma mater as if we did not adopt an aggressive stance against marijuana. Perhaps Sodexo would report astronomically improved food reviews. And curiously, an inexplicable upward trend in botany and music appreciation class enrollments might obtain. Trust me, in this 420 California nightmare, the Green team and Student-Led Coffeehouse both mean something very different. With his hands tied by rampant student support, Dean Hall unveils the newest abroad program: Amsterdam. No folks, this isn’t your grandfather’s Pepperdine anymore. You see, a pot-friendly Pepperdine is an abominable state of nature where law and order are not to be found.
Clearly, as you well know, readers, I am militantly against the legalization of cannabis and I fiercely hope that Pepperdine will never have to consider such a silly tension in state and institutional policies. I mean, legalization would be one thing to consider if we, say, lived in a state where high-quality hydroponic marijuana were readily available for relatively low costs. But no, I say it is far better to leave marijuana regulation to the seedy underbelly of medical marijuana capitalists and druglords and just hope and pray that we never have to confront the issue on our hallowed grounds.
