Editor’s Note: Allegra Huston’s new book, Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, hit bookstores last spring. Allegra is the youngest daughter of film director John Huston and sister of Oscar-winning actress Anjelica Huston. She was born in London, raised in Ireland and Los Angeles, and now lives in Taos, NM. She was a publisher in London for nine years and has been a freelance writer and editor since 1994.

It’s dark. You’re walking to your car, the subway or just home. You spot a gang of youths out for a night of fun. Your heart races. Then you see what they’re doing: smoking dope. Oh, no! You might trip over one of them. Maybe they’ll philosophize you to death.

Good thing they’re not doing something legal, like drinking, which might get you a broken bottle in the face.

I’m not such a libertarian that I’m arguing for the legalization of all drugs — I’ve seen what hard drugs can do. But let’s be sensible. Why do we criminalize more than a quarter of the population for enjoying a substance whose primary effects are relaxation, the munchies and an overuse of the word "dude"? I don’t use cannabis, but I also don’t jump out of airplanes, go on ten-day fasts, eat peanut butter or engage in masochistic sex; and as people who enjoy those things aren’t hurting anybody but themselves, I don’t see the point of banning them. In fact, I think we should mandate cannabis use for politicians; then they might actually tell the truth, as Al Capone’s henchman did when the FBI gave him a joint to loosen him up for interrogation.

But it’s a Drug — that dreaded word. OK, what’s a drug? "A substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body."  Too broad. "Something and often an illegal substance that causes addiction, habituation or a marked change in consciousness." That covers coffee, video games and iPhones, not to mention alcohol and tobacco. OK, I’m queen for a day, and I say they’re bad for people. Now they’re illegal. You’ll call them drugs.

Full disclosure: I have tried, twice, to smoke a joint. I couldn’t; my throat burned, it hurt. I tried hash brownies too, but uttering a sentence was like hauling on ropes to put my brain back together. I ate too many. I couldn’t resist: I’m addicted to chocolate.

That’s my point: A drug would be a medicine, or just a vice, or merely an indulgence, if it weren’t illegal. So why is cannabis illegal?

It’s virtually impossible to figure out why some drugs and not others were made illegal in the first place. The history of criminalization is piecemeal and murky. The first ban on cannabis was a specifically anti-Muslim act, propagated by those guardians of all that is right and good, the Spanish Inquisition — who, when they came to the New World, instantly concluded that the hallucinogenic drugs used in native religion must be tools of the devil. It’s hard not to see racism and power politics at work in all this, especially when you look at old propaganda images of black men high on cocaine raping white women, and sinister Chinese luring the flower of white youth into their opium dens.