HIGHER STANDARDS

A few days before Senator Barack Obama swept the Democratic primaries
in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, people across
the country, picking up their favorite newspaper, were greeted with
the following headline:

OLD FRIENDS SAY DRUGS PLAYED

BIG PART IN OBAMA'S YOUNG LIFE

In any event, that's what some readers thought they read. On second
glance, they realized their mistake. The headline actually said this:

OLD FRIENDS SAY DRUGS PLAYED

BIT PART IN OBAMA'S YOUNG LIFE

Maybe, though, the mistake wasn't just the readers', especially the
bleary-eyed among them who hadn't yet had their morning coffee. After
all, it wasn't exactly news that "drugs" had played a part (and only
a "bit part" at that) in the adolescence of the junior senator from
Illinois. That particular factoid had been on the public record for
more than twelve years. And if it wasn't news, what was it doing on
the front page of the New York Times?

The big news, or bit news, about Obama and drugs had been broken by
the future Presidential candidate himself, in "Dreams from My
Father," published in 1995, when he was thirty-three years old. In
"Dreams," Obama treats his teen-age chemical indulgences the way he
treats pretty much everything else in his coming-of-age story:
subtly, with impressive emotional acuity, against a richly drawn
personal, cultural, and social background. Ripped from their context
like the heart of an Aztec sacrifice, the facts Obama presents are
these: He smoked pot during his last couple of years of high school,
in Hawaii, and his first couple of years of college, at Occidental,
in California. Once in a while, he treated himself to "a little
blow." After his sophomore year, he transferred east, to Columbia,
where he took up running (three miles a day), stopped hanging out in
bars, and started keeping a journal. Also, he writes, "I quit getting
high." That's about all. Substance,! apparently, became more
interesting to him than substance abuse.

But it's not as if the Times' nearly two thousand words had nothing
to add to this. "Mr. Obama's account of his younger self and drugs,
though, significantly differs from the recollections of others," the
paper's story teases, as if promising scandal. Is a Perry Mason
moment at hand? Not really:

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors
from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being
grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be
grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

The news here is--what, exactly? That Obama, who now appears
grounded, motivated, and poised, formerly appeared grounded,
motivated, and poised? That his inner uncertainties, such as they
were, were more apparent to himself than to others? That he was
marginally less of a pothead than he has made himself out to be?

If this last was the point, it at least shows that times have--to use
the past participle of Obama's favorite word--changed. For a
candidate to stand accused of exaggerating his youthful drug use is
something new indeed. Yet the overall cultural trend is unmistakable.
In 1987, Douglas H. Ginsburg's disclosure that (as the Times
reported) "he had smoked marijuana a number of times after becoming a
professor at the Harvard Law School" sank his Supreme Court
nomination faster than you could just say no. In 1992, making an
early foray into verbal hairsplitting, Bill Clinton said he had
"never broken a state law," meaning that England was where he hadn't
inhaled. By 2000, we were well into the age of the "experimented with
marijuana" dodge, with getting zonked spun as a science project. But
in 2004 the three leading Democratic hopefuls--John Kerry, Howard
Dean, and John Edwards--all acknowledged without quibbling that
they'd smoked pot.

As for the two other senators who currently stand a chance of being
elected President, Hillary Clinton and John McCain have issued
denials, though McCain seemed downright apologetic about it. Asked
the question in 2000, he pointed out that he was in a North
Vietnamese prison camp by the time pot became the Navy's weed of
choice when the smoking lamp was lit. "Also," he added sheepishly,
"remember my age: sixty-three." And the current occupier of the Oval
Office? Well, George W. Bush announced in 1999 that he had been drug
free since 1974.

None of this ought to matter, of course. Voters, rightly, don't much
seem to care. But there is a glaring discontinuity between the lived
experience of Americans and the drug policies of their governments.
Nearly a hundred million of us--forty per cent of the adult
population, including pillars of the nation's political, financial,
academic, and media elites--have smoked (and, therefore, possessed)
marijuana at some point, thereby committing an offense that, with a
bit of bad luck, could have resulted in humiliation, the loss of
benefits such as college loans and scholarships, or worse. More than
forty thousand people are in jail for marijuana offenses, and some
seven hundred thousand are arrested annually merely for possession.
Meanwhile, the percentage of high-school seniors who have used pot
has remained steady, between forty and fifty per cent. Nor have the
prices of illicit drugs--which would rise sharply if the drug war
were having any success--change! d appreciably. Indeed, according to
the government's "National Drug Threat Assessment" for 2008,
increases in domestic pot production, combined with the continued
flow from abroad, point to a future of "market saturation," which
"could reduce the price of the drug significantly." Meanwhile,
potency has "reached its highest recorded level."

Of all our country's ongoing wars--poverty, cancer, Iraq,
Afghanistan--none is a more comprehensive disaster than the war on
drugs. Unlike McCain, Obama and Clinton have at least promised to
stop the feds from harassing medical marijuana patients and
dispensaries in the dozen states whose laws permit marijuana to be
used for medical purposes. But neither has given any indication of a
willingness to rescue us from the larger disgrace of the drug
war--the billions wasted, the millions harmed, the utter futility of
it. On this point, hesitancy trumps hope, and expedience trumps experience.