I thought David Brooks was supposed to be an erudite diploma waving intellectual.

Smoked marijuana "in his younger days"? “It was fun? I have some fond memories of us all being silly together? I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships?” And he calls it "lesser pleasures"?

What an uneducated thing to even consider. He is basically saying that pot should be consumed by children. Which is true for some who need to control seizures or the vomiting from cancer therapy. He ignored corporations profiting from criminal incarceration but also ignored the fact that enjoying the highest pleasures arts or being in nature can enhanced by being high. Marijuana IS nature. It is a substance created by a natural process that is good. Nature also creates poisonous things but that does not negate the fact that the aspects of all positive things created by nature should not be enjoyed.

I sometimes contemplate if nature has ever created processes and things that human beings could have enjoyed but will never be experienced because they go extinct before we can enjoy them. That happens in the plant and animal kingdom all the time.

What if the deliberate attempt to destroy all marijuana had been successful? What an even sadder world it would be.