REEFER MADNESS

We're all used to stomaching a little political hypocrisy in the United
States, and around election time we have to gag down more than usual. But
there are times when the gap between reality and rhetoric, between what we
know to be true and what our leaders say, becomes so outrageous as to feel
positively surreal. And the war on drugs -- specifically, the campaign
against marijuana use which makes up a major portion of that war -- has now
gone beyond the tolerable Magritte phase and into full-blown, hideous,
melted-watches Dali.

Wednesday night, two men who everybody knows spent portions of their youth
toking deeply on large spliffs -- Al Gore has essentially admitted it;
George W. Bush will only say he's been drug-free since his late 20s, and
won't talk about the years before that -- are appearing in front of the
American people and asking to be elected president. If the subject of drugs
comes up -- and unbelievably, it rarely does along the campaign trail --
hardliner Bush will call for offenders to be drawn and quartered, while
bleeding-heart Gore will propose that they be impaled on sharpened spikes.

And as they speak, we will all pretend a lot of things.

We will pretend not to notice that talking about "drugs" without
distinguishing between different kinds of drugs, or between using drugs and
selling them, is as absurd as lumping jaywalkers and rapists together.

We will pretend that getting high, which every culture in the history of
mankind has done, is a dreadful, shameful sin that can only be expiated by
conversion to Christianity or some similar cataclysmic, prior-life-erasing act.

We will pretend that the official propaganda that marijuana is a "gateway"
drug leading inexorably to hard drug use is an argument worthy of serious
consideration and not a cartoon out of the "Reefer Madness" era.

We will pretend that we don't either know or strongly suspect that most of
our co-workers and friends have smoked or still smoke dope, with no
apparent ill effects (except for that one high-ranking exec's tendency to
start babbling about the novel he's going to write).

We will pretend that there is nothing hypocritical about two former
recreational drug users -- who somehow miraculously emerged unscathed from
the billowing clouds of smoke and Jim Beam fumes to vie for the most
powerful office in the world -- who refuse to talk honestly about the issue.

And when we're done with all this pretending, we'll get the taste out of
our mouths with a couple of martinis. Or a joint.

America's marijuana hypocrisy is not the biggest issue facing the country,
not by a long shot. But it just may be the most irritating. It's the
flag-draped elephant in the room, the glaring absurdity that dare not be
questioned lest one be tarred as a dazed and confused corrupter of youth.
Being forced to walk past this big, tail-swinging, peanut-crunching
mountain of moralizing idiocy is maddening, but our hysterical primitivism
about drugs has more serious consequences.

The war on drugs has resulted in an incarceration rate so obscene that
almost 1 in 4 of every person behind bars in the entire world is locked up
in the United States. At this very moment, American jails and prisons hold
tens of thousands of people -- vastly disproportionate numbers of them
black -- whose only crime is possession of marijuana.

The drug war degrades respect for authority. It leads to cynicism and
apathy. And, of course, it blights thousands of lives. In 1998, over
600,000 Americans were arrested for simple possession of marijuana: They
were handcuffed, read their rights, booked. Comparatively few of these
people were actually sentenced to prison terms, but the damage was done.
There are 600,000 Americans who feel just that much further outside civil
society than they did before -- and needlessly so.

Our ostrich-like stance on this subject was highlighted last week by the
great Marijuana Debacle that befell the British Conservative Party. Tory
shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe, trying to seize the moralistic high
ground so beloved by right-wingers on both sides of the pond, proposed that
possession of even the smallest amounts of cannabis be punished by a
mandatory 100-pound fine. For a few days everything went swimmingly --
until one Tory shadow cabinet minister after the next came forward to say
that well, maybe the law wouldn't be such a good idea because, actually,
they themselves had smoked marijuana.

The final blow was when Tory agriculture spokesman Tim Yeo said that not
only had he smoked marijuana, he liked it -- the first time that a
politician has ever dared to state this shocking fact, which flies in the
face of everything we know about the crazed, subhuman addicts who are in
the thrall of the killer weed. Widdecombe and Tory leader William Hague had
to beat an extremely undignified retreat, and a national debate has begun
about marijuana laws in the U.K.

Of course, the ministers who suddenly came forward with tales of Oxford
undergrad puffery probably had their own less-than-noble reasons for doing
so, most of them having to do with checking the political ambitions of Ms.
Widdecombe. But the point is that England has a political and civic culture
enlightened enough that eight high-ranking right-wing politicians could not
only admit they smoked dope, but could refuse on the grounds of rudimentary
morality to punish others harshly for a crime they themselves had committed.

By contrast, try to imagine Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, William
Bennett and their ilk all coming forward and admitting that they'd smoked
dope in their 20s, and that maybe our draconian drug laws could use a
reappraisal. It's inconceivable: The Big Lie foisted by anti-drug
propaganda, which paints all drug users as criminal and degraded and which
American journalists have been too cowardly to challenge, is so mutely
accepted that it would take a politician of rare courage to stand up and
say that the emperor -- or the czar -- has no clothes.

So in terms of humaneness and honesty about drugs we're humiliatingly
behind England -- and England has the harshest marijuana laws in all of
Europe! Spain, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Greece and most of
the other European countries have essentially decriminalized marijuana use,
or given it the lowest law-enforcement priority. There are many excellent
legacies of our Puritan past -- the hormone-injected turkeys that grace our
Thanksgiving tables; workaholic tendencies that allow us to buy vast,
chrome-bedecked SUVs -- but our ludicrous insistence that pounding four
Maker's Mark Manhattans is somehow better for the individual and society
than taking a few puffs on the pipe of peace is not one of them.

When word came down that George W. Bush, former party-hearty boy whose
greatest and indeed sole asset as a candidate was his supposed
"likability," was going to be the GOP candidate, one could be forgiven for
fondly hoping that he might somehow pull a Nixon-in-China on the drug
issue. No triangulating Democrat, of course, could ever go up against the
drug orthodoxy. Poor wimpy Clinton was so traumatized by the subject that
all that smoke he sucked into his lungs back in his longhair days suddenly
vanished, leaving him clear-headed, rational and ready to jump the bones of
the first intern to present her thong in the Oval Office. And Gore, fearing
that he'd be painted by the right as even more of a decadent,
Hollywood-loving menace than he already has been, won't make a peep. But
Bush, one might have thought, just might be able to do it.

Of course, Bush's own carefully-phrased non-denials of illegal drug use
made it hard for him to move on the subject. But the real reason is his
complete moral obliviousness, the cavalier, smirking negligence about
anything fundamentally serious that Bush and his all-too-familiar ilk wear
like a badge of honor. These qualities, which large numbers of male voters
apparently find make him more "fun" than Gore the Stiff, make it impossible
for him to connect his own experiences with those of the thousands of
mostly poor, often black or Latino Texans languishing in his state's
singularly harsh and backward penal system. (The outrage in Tulia, where
the black population was decimated by a drug sting operation, is just an
extreme manifestation of the holy Drug War, Texas-style.)

Far from being troubled by any moral inconsistency, Bush breezily attacks
Clinton and Gore -- who, good triangulators that they are, have tilted
heavily towards interdiction and punishment and away from treatment -- for
not being harsh enough on drugs. It's too bad some kind of time-warp
punishment isn't available, in which the middle-aged Bush could travel back
in time and personally flog his younger self with a cat o' nine tails for
the moral edification of us all.

Of course drugs, even the relatively innocuous marijuana, aren't harmless.
They do cause social problems. But our current hysterical and heavy-handed
rhetoric and solutions aren't working -- and our leaders' refusal to even
talk about alternatives reflects badly not just on them, but on our
national maturity. It's time to grow up, accept that drug use will always
be with us, treat responsible recreational drug users more or less the same
way we treat recreational drinkers and start talking about ways to minimize
the negative impact of drug abuse on the individual and society. Whether
the solution is legalization, European-style decriminalization,
discretionary sentencing or something else remains to be worked out. But
until America starts confronting reality on this issue, we will continue to
be the embarrassing teenager on the block.