In Junior year of high school, I had 2 teachers I suspected were gay. One was apparently schooled in the Felix Unger school of passing straight, wore a thin black toupee over deep set eyes and a sarcastic pencil thin French mustache. Not a popular guy, his habit of assigning after school work made him even less popular. At various times, he had 20 or 30 students staying behind after school performing various pieces of busywork, wishing him dead with all the bloody-chickened teenage Santeria they could muster. It's hard to believe in the devil when you see someone so hated. If there were such a thing as demons, wouldn't they offer some colon-busting, tormented afterlife to this man in exchange for all the secondary school souls they could eat? I would, and I'm not even that evil. He was so despised for his snotty attitude, poorly groomed artificial hair and scholastic habits that no one even ever got around to the fact that he was gay, something that seemed pretty definitive from his lisp and general demeanor. Given the rampaging homophobia prevalent in most all boy Catholic high schools, you have to be a real Asswipe to get people to miss out on the fact that you're gay. And maybe that was the idea. Let's call him Mr. Asswipe.

The other I suspected was actually the most popular teacher in the school. We'll call him Mr. Handsome. And he was. A handsome, athletic guy who constantly wandered into class a moment or two late, usually with a fresh Band-Aid or black and blue mark somewhere. I may have been one of the only people in the class at the time who could put the pieces together and chalk his injuries up to a little rough trade. I could tell he was a pretty live guy. He had the walk of a man with a constant erection who enjoyed a little whipping on his spare time. No worries. No one else even seemed to notice. Probably because he was an amazingly cool teacher. He asked about us, honestly interested, gave advice, chose books we were sure to enjoy, put the chairs in a circle and solicited our opinions on everything. If someone wanted to talk to him after class, he was glad to be there, but he would never think about punishing us by making us stay late. One Friday, we asked him why he never made us stay late. He gave us 2 simple reasons.

1. I have too much respect for this school to use it as a punishment.
2. If I make you fuckers stay here, I have to stay, too. Why do I want to punish myself?

These seemed like fantastic reasons to me. I actually remember applauding. How often do you get to applaud a teacher? Three cheers for Mr. Handsome.

I've been thinking a lot about Mr. Handsome and Mr. Asswipe lately. I think of them as the Goofus and Gallant of the Teaching set. I have a pretty good idea what the American penal system would look like if run by Mr. Handsome or Mr. Asswipe. In 2005, the last year we have good numbers for, over 750,000 people in the US were arrested for marijuana charges. Over 40,000 people are incarcerated right now in state or federal prisons for marijuana, and that doesn't count the substantial county and local prisoners. If we do, the number rises to over 135,000. In fact, about 1 out of every 7 drug offenders in jail are there for pot. It costs over a billion dollars a year to keep them there. To keep things in perspective, a billion dollars is what it would cost, at 200 dollars a head and minus applicable taxes, to get the next 5 million people you meet a hooker for the next hour. The costs of managing juvenile marijuana offenders alone is about 200,000 dollars. To keep things in perspective, with this amount of money, minus applicable taxes, you could purchase 200,000 items from the McDonald's dollar menu. The cost of oversight over the prohibition of marijuana in this country is over 8 billion dollars a year. To keep things in perspective, this is the equivalent of 8 people writing "just say no" a billion times on a blackboard 200 times larger than the great wall of China at a dollar a piece. Of course, we're also talking about an estimated 4.2 billion dollars a year in lost productivity from the temporary or long-term incarceration of marijuana offenders. You could buy Britney Spears' hair on eBay 4,200 times for this amount of money.

Doesn't seem like much, written out that way, I should stay away from the Britney stuff.

This is clearly a Mr. Asswipe plan. What Mr. Asswipe failed to notice was that when he made students stay after school day after day, HE HAD TO STAY WITH THEM. He effectively fucked himself out of a social life. I don't know what sort of social life Mr. Asswipe was destined to have anyway, but I do know what kind Mr. Handsome had. I saw the bruises myself. 40 percent of the population of the United States aged 12 and over, according to government sponsored polls, would admit to having used marijuana. That's a huge number of people. We are so determined to fuck them that we choose to waste billions of dollars a year, the time of police officers, judges, federal and state employees, etc., and our own sense of absurdest irony to make them suffer for it.

Marijuana is not harmless. I never said it was. Neither is alcohol or tobacco. For the record, I don't do any of these things and never did, so my objection to marijuana legislation has nothing to do with wanting to get high in peace tonight. It has to do with two things. Much like Mr. Handsome's objections to Mr. Asswipe's policies, it's simple.

1. I have too much respect for our legal system to imagine that we could be so stupid and shortsighted.
2. If we make you fuckers sit in jail, we all have to pay for it. Why do I want to punish myself?

Not ironclad arguments, I know, but certainly something to consider. In itself, the fact that a policy is incredibly expensive is no reason to abandon it. The fact that it criminalizes a large portion of the population for engaging in consensual, non-violent behavior is, alone, not a reason, necessarily to abandon it. The fact that it causes police officers and judges to put their time toward punishing people who aren't truly damaging the community is not, in itself, a good reason to abandon it. The fact that there are more demanding problems in our community than Tommy Chong is not solely a good reason to abandon it.

I suppose it's going to be up to us to figure out when enough reasons have collected in the rain bucket of our penal system. Jimmy Carter once said that the penalties for drug use should not be more damaging than the effects of that drug use itself. He meant damaging to the individual, but it clearly applies to the community, as well. Mr. Asswipe would disagree. The rules are the rules and that's that. Mr. Handsome would ask us to consider what we get for these rules and what we lose.

And then he would probably let a hot little Latino smack him around a little. So three more cheers for Mr. Handsome. A man with a philosophy.

 Jim Marcus is a singer/songwriter, director, photographer, writer, performance artist and social activist. And really, that list doesn't even touch the surface of all the things he's done or is doing.

A founding member of the seminal Industrial band Die Warzau, Jim Marcus has worked with artists in all genres, from Björk to Revenge, Steel Pulse, Pansy Division, Machines of Loving Grace, George Clinton, KMFDM, Gravity Kills, Pigface, Little Louis, and more. Die Warzau's fifth album, "Supergangbang" is slated for release in Spring 2007. Mr. Marcus is also currently at work on his first solo release, entitled "Wonderland".