Berkeley, California, has long occupied a soft spot in the liberal heart. In popular mythology, it’s the 1960s birthplace of the free speech movement, in which idealistic young hippies helped push for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.
Today, though, those ’60s radicals and their ideological descendants largely control the levers of power in both local government and the University of California’s flagship university. The results are both hilarious and sadly instructive, even in a state that has long been a leading exporter of daffy political ideas. Berkeley’s anything-goes, free-love vibe of yesteryear has today morphed into a unique brew of anything-goes lawlessness—think of last year’s Antifa riots.
But mostly it’s morphed into a quieter, dumber form of publicly funded, tightly regulated bohemianism.
The latest example comes as cities across California are debating regulations for recreational marijuana, which became legal in the state on January 1. As elsewhere, Berkeley wants to limit the number of legal pot dispensaries within its borders. When the city’s cannabis commission—that’s an actual government panel now—this month recommended a limit of 32 dispensary licenses in the city of 120,000, one city council member objected that the arbitrary limit would “stifle innovation.” Another thought the number was too high: “We don’t have 32 candy stores in Berkeley,” she complained.
A related proposal would give preferences for dispensary licenses to ex-cons: “To the extent that someone has demonstrated that they themselves have been personally affected by cannabis prohibition, they would receive priority,” cannabis commissioner Cecily Brewster said. Nearby Oakland already has a similar law.
Berkeley city council members are also mulling a proposal to create a “cannabis fund” that would “support license candidates who have been negatively affected by ‘cannabis prohibition’ enforcement in the past,” according to the Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper. Think of it as reparations payments for the wrongs done to potheads in the past.
This all comes after last month’s decision in which the city council voted unanimously to become the country’s first “sanctuary city” for recreational marijuana and directed local police not to cooperate with federal drug enforcement.
Granting government preferences for ex-cons to run all-cash pot businesses . . . subsidizing them with public money . . . telling law enforcement to stand down . . . whatever one thinks of legalized pot, these all sound like bizarre and dangerous ideas. But it seems to us that they are the natural end results of the leftist counterculture that flourished in Berkeley half a century ago: What began as youthful, if deeply misguided, optimism ends as a government-funded retirement system for befuddled old beatniks.
The whole spectacle puts us in mind of that dictum of Karl Marx. History repeats itself, the revolutionary said, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
