Harvard senior Joshua Lipson makes the case that his fellow scholars need to get “into the habit of occasional rule-breaking and convention-flouting” by using marijuana.

Perhaps he is considering continuing his education at Humboldt’s Marijuana Institute?

Every election season, Harvard’s undergraduate population bubbles over with enthusiasm for Barack Obamas and Elizabeth Warrens—standard-bearers of the well-behaved, mainstream liberalism that sets the cultural tone on campus. Students will pledge fealty to the sixties’ hallmark ideals: grassroots creativity, self-expression, lifestyle experimentation. But contrary to popular imagination, they will continue to lead overwhelmingly conservative lives.

Nothing illustrates this principle more starkly than the strange reality of marijuana at Harvard: that is to say, it’s rarer than you might expect. On the campus where Timothy Leary once conducted lab experiments with much harder drugs, only 35% of 2012’s graduating seniors claimed to have ever tried marijuana—as compared to 47% of American college students, by the Harvard School of Public Health’s account. This is not for lack of intoxication, however. By contrast, a substantial 67% admit to drinking alcohol at least once a week, with 93% admitting to have tried the liquid drug at least once.

All things being equal, I’m struck by the profundity of the gap. We might do well to experience the graces of a plant thought widely to combat stress, increase empathy, and spur creativity. And unlike alcohol, marijuana is not known to precipitate violence, hangovers, or cirrhosis. Recall, this is not a case for decriminalization—Massachusetts has already done it—nor for legalization, which most well-trained Harvard liberals support in abstract, and which Washington and Colorado have already come to do. It’s a case for experimentation.

…..Marijuana, rated as both less dangerous and less habit-forming than alcohol, carries none of these nefarious associations. In “The Third Chimpanzee,” Jared Diamond describes intoxication as a deep-seated, universal human phenomenon. If that is so, why not consider substituting out alcohol, at least occasionally, for something calmer, safer, and less addictive?

Harkening to its countercultural associations, the marijuana issue is finally a test of our open-mindedness, our ability to question authority. For what it’s worth, most Harvard students have a rules problem: as a Crimson mentor of mine once summarized it, “Harvard is a school made up of kids who sat in the first row of the class in grade school and probably ratted out those passing notes in the back. We got into Harvard by showing respect—nay, devotion—to social rules, and rebellion just isn’t in our blood.” There’s nothing inherently subversive about marijuana, yet substituting it for alcohol would be a near-harmless way to get Harvard students into the habit of occasional rule-breaking and convention-flouting. In a world packed with arbitrary injustices and limitations, you bet we need it.