Reopen routes to the middle class

Colorado and Washington approved marijuana use in the recent election. David Frum, conservative columnist for Newsweek, talks about its dangers. He notes that pot smokers miss more work, don't do as well in school, and tend to be more poor. At least he doesn't confuse correlation and causation and allows two interpretations: Pot use tends to make you poor. Poor people are more likely to use pot.

I won't get into that (comments to the article do a decent job of it), though it would be entertaining to sit Dan Savage and David Frum in the same room to hash it out. Savage has a chapter on pot use in his book, Skipping Towards Gomorrah. The book is one reason why Savage is referred to as an ethicist for our time.

What I do want to get into is another section of Frum's column. He wrote:

The young people most likely to become habitual users are those who already face declining opportunities. Over the past generation, American society has closed route after route into the middle class. Wages are stagnant, upward mobility has slowed, job security has deterior¬ated, higher education has become more expensive, and two-parent families have dwindled. Meanwhile, we have opened more and more roads to self-harm. Must we now open another?

If declining opportunities leads some to become habitual users, there is another way out. Let's reopen all those closed routes to the middle class. Let's make wages less stagnant, improve job security, and reduce the cost of higher education. Our young people (as well as the established worker and the person forced into retirement before they're ready) might be less inclined towards self-harm.