GORE IS PANDERING AWAY THE PRESIDENCY

When future historians chart the downward course of Vice President Gore's
presidential campaign, they will probably start with Elian Gonzalez. Gore's
collapse in the face of Miami's professional anti-Castro claque captured
everything that is wrong with the campaign and everything that is wrong
with the candidate.

While the Clinton administration took the sensible position that the child
should be reunited with his father and returned to Cuba, Gore took the
position that Elian's fate should be resolved in family court, probably the
most no-win idea advanced in the whole controversy. To suggest that the
dispute between Elian's father and his Miami relatives should be treated as
a custody dispute flies in the face of the law and everything we know about
child welfare.

The Miami relatives have no standing in any court except the court of Cuban
emigre opinion. The majority of Americans rightly believed the child should
be returned to his father and supported the administration's actions to
return the child to his father.

As we recover from this psychotic episode, many Americans who haven't given
a thought to Cuba in years are suddenly aware that a small, noisy cabal in
Miami is dictating U.S. foreign policy. That bubble will burst, just as the
nationalist China lobby did, and Gore will be remembered for shamelessly
pandering to the Cuban emigre community in an effort to win the nation's
fourth most populous state.

Talk to former Gore supporters and you hear something along the lines of,
"But he really lost me with the Elian Gonzalez business."

Now he has weighed in against the medical use of marijuana. Speaking last
Thursday to students at the Elizabeth Learning Center in Cudahy, Calif., he
said: "I believe that the question of medical marijuana ought to be based
strictly on science. . . . I want you to know that right now, it is my
belief and understanding that there is no reliable evidence that it is a
superior, effective treatment for pain in any situation where there is not
a better alternative today."

Last December, in New Hampshire, he had a somewhat different view: "I think
where you have doctors who have documented that there is a specific case
with symptoms where this is definitely going to alleviate pain, I think
that's something else again." He said that he was not in favor of
legalizing marijuana, but that "where you have sufficient controls, I think
that doctors ought to have that option." Later, he backpedaled, saying the
question should be decided on the basis of scientific research, and adding:
"The prevailing opinion by the majority of physicians today--as I
understand it, and I'm no expert--is that it is not ever preferable to have
a smoke-carried agent for relief of nausea or pain."

Someone should send him a copy of "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Fact," a
review of the research written by professors Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan
and published by the Lindesmith Center, which advocates reforms in drug
policy. "Marijuana's therapeutic uses are well documented in the modern
scientific literature," they write. "Using either smoked marijuana or oral
preparations of delta-9-THC (marijuana's main active ingredient),
researchers have conducted controlled studies. These studies demonstrate
marijuana's usefulness in reducing nausea and vomiting, stimulating
appetite, promoting weight gain, and diminishing intraocular pressure from
glaucoma. There is also evidence that smoked marijuana and/or THC reduce
muscle spasticity from spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis and
diminish tremors in multiple sclerosis patients. Other therapeutic uses for
marijuana have not been widely studied. However, patients and physicians
have reported that smoked marijuana provides relief from migraine
headaches, depression, seizures, insomnia and chronic pain."

One of marijuana's other ingredients "appears to be useful as an
anticonvulsant," they write. For people suffering from nausea and vomiting
from AIDS or chemotherapy, smoking provides more rapid relief than
swallowing a synthetic version of THC.

What is useful to remember is that many drugs used in the treatment of AIDS
and cancer are enormously toxic. Chemotherapy agents can cause everything
from heart damage to liver failure. Anti-nausea medications can cause
headaches, constipation or diarrhea.

There has been no federally funded research into the medical uses of
marijuana in more than a decade. What is known is that most patients who
use it have to buy it on the black market, where dosage and purity are a
gamble, a significant problem for AIDS and chemotherapy patients whose
immune systems are badly compromised. Medical use of marijuana has been
endorsed by numerous medical associations.

But here again, Gore is pandering, this time to the anti-drug lobby, and it
is particularly obnoxious coming from someone who apparently enjoyed easy
access to marijuana to treat the joys and sorrows of an early journalistic
career at the Nashville Tennessean.

Gore is trailing badly among white male voters as well as the under-30
crowd, and he is losing support among women. What is wrong with this
campaign? Why is someone who suffers from syntactical aphasia leading him
in the polls? It's not the perceived lack of warmth he and his handlers
have been struggling with. It's a lack of commitment to a set of principles
that voters can count on. Voters are looking for someone they believe will
be his own man. They are not looking for someone who will pander to
hysterical interest groups to be elected. The presidency, above anything
else, is about leadership and so far, Gore seems to be following.