The Media is High

First of all, this is still very strange to me. I am no legal scholar - only an aspiring one - but I am very uncomfortable with a law being enacted by the legislature and reiterated by the high court, while enforcement authorities seem to have no intention of enforcing it. Matt Drudge summed it up best with his headline: the attitude of the law towards smoking marijuana seems to be "whatever".

What is more annoying is having to read things like this, in the above story:

The ruling could be an early test of the compassion Attorney General Alberto Gonzales promised to bring to the Justice Department following the tenure of John Ashcroft.

Now, I'm no journalistic scholar - and hardly even aspiring to that - but that doesn't strike me as proper reporting, or news at all. It also could be a case of foot-in-mouth disease by the Washington Post. Can I write that in my newspaper? In fact, the whole marijuana thing could be indicative of a degradation of the moral fabric of society. It could be the result of subversion attempts by al-qaeda [possible sic]

Or it could just be a tension between one end of the spectrum of the war on drugs and the other: weakening marijuana laws undermines the fight against fatally adictive and violent crime inducing heroine and cocaine.

Ever think of writing that, Mark Sherman of the Associated Press?