Sullivan has been running a fascinating set of letters from readers this week, from people who acknowledge that they are in the “cannabis closet.”

There’s the 42-year-old married father of three, a homeowner and a football coach. A 41-year-old contract manager for a govenment agency and treasurer for the PTA. A middle-aged woman with two teenage kids who volunteers for a number of local community organizations. All responsible citizens.

But all of them criminal by virtue of the fact that they break a single law: They get high.

When I wrote, several weeks ago in the print edition, about how the Michael Phelps (and Santonio Holmes) situation revealed a blatant hypocrisy about our societal position on drugs - smoke the demon weed and you’re destined to become a stoner slacker, if you don’t graduate to harder drugs - I also heard from a few of the same type of people Sullivan has been getting letters from.

On the other hand, I got a bit of reefer madness - from people who were, and are, literally hysterical in their reaction to the drug. A swim coach who said, how dare I suggest that maybe marijuana isn’t all that bad:

Are you a parent of a teenager?  Why not stop by a rehab for teens and try writing another load of crap like you did for the Sunday newspaper.  I know a few parents that wish they hadn’t been so “understanding” the first time they discovered drug use/abuse.  POT SMOKING has ruined careers.

But pot smoking has also not ruined careers.

Drinking has ruined careers, yet we as a society have laid the blame for this upon the individuals who are unable to control themselves. Because we tried prohibition and it didn’t work; neither has marijuana prohibition worked. Indeed, that was the theme of Sen. Jim Webb’s piece in last weekend’s Parade magazine - pointing out that our prisons are overcrowded in large part because of marijuana prohibition:

Justice statistics also show that 47.5% of all the drug arrests in our country in 2007 were for marijuana offenses. Additionally, nearly 60% of the people in state prisons serving time for a drug offense had no history of violence or of any significant selling activity. Indeed, four out of five drug arrests were for possession of illegal substances, while only one out of five was for sales. Three-quarters of the drug offenders in our state prisons were there for nonviolent or purely drug offenses.

And prohibition is also fueling the increasingly brutal Mexican drug trade.

But there’s a rational approach to this subject and an irrational, hysterical approach to the subject. To the hysterics, no amount of rationality can change their sure convictions; but this hysteria virtually ensures that we will continue to fill the prisons with non-violent users.

And maybe they like Newt Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly’s idea of randomly drug-testing all Americans and - if you’re caught with any drugs in your bloodstream - you get to go to mandatory rehab!

You can have rationality or you can have a police state. But you can’t have both.