MAKE NO MISTAKE: DRUGS AND CANDIDATES

"I think baby boomers ought to say [to their kids], 'I've learned from
mistakes I may or may not have made and I'd like to share some wisdom,' "
George W. Bush said last summer.

Now if he can actually sell this line to his teenage daughters, he's a
better politician than I've given him credit for. But he has successfully
sold it to the rest of us, avoiding further prying into whether, when and
how often his own youthful mistakes might have included the use of illegal
drugs.

Since then it has been fashionable, especially among reporters, to shrug
and dismiss the entire issue of candidates' drug use as a distant artifact
of the settled past. When Vice President Gore was recently accused, in a
new biography by Newsweek correspondent Bill Turque, of using marijuana as
a young man far more habitually than he had admitted, the allegation
commanded little coverage.

The public no longer has an appetite for "character cop" journalism, we
tell each other.

And besides, aren't we talking about minor peccadilloes? And don't a lot of
us live in glass houses ourselves, where college-era drug use is concerned?

There's just one problem with this dismissive instinct: It concerns a class
of possible crime for which the U.S. government and many states now
routinely jail their citizens, with the hearty approval of both candidates.

Welcome to the first all-boomer presidential contest.

Now that both parties have essentially settled their nomination battles, we
are left to face what it means to have, as presidential choices, two men
who appear to have predictably complicated pasts in the area of drug use.
Try as we might to deny that it matters, the hypocrisy of both campaigns is
something for which we may ultimately pay a heavy price.

I don't care much, personally, about either man's past use of drugs: If the
allegations about Gore, for example, are true, they mark his history as
similar to my own. But I do care about having a president who has both the
will and the political running room to begin a radical shift in our entire
approach to drug control. And a boomer president laboring to finesse the
gap between his own history and the climate of hysteria that surrounds our
drug policy is probably the last person who can deliver the change we need.

Our laws, policies and social attitudes toward drugs today are a mass of
contradiction and willed ignorance.

Despite ample evidence that our real problem - the locus of almost all the
violence, crime and mortality associated with drugs - concerns hard-core
addicts who use drugs such as cocaine and heroin, we act and talk as though
the biggest menace we face is pot-smoking by middle-class teenagers.

Despite two decades of proof that interdiction and tough law-enforcement
will do nothing to stop the sale or use of drugs, our prison populations
are skyrocketing. Mandatory minimum sentences have consigned to prison,
without parole, great numbers of low-level dealers and even users, forcing
the release of violent offenders for whom there is no longer room. And our
drug war compromises both the ideals and the workings of our criminal
justice system, which metes out far harsher treatment to black than to
white drug defendants.

There was a brief time when we addressed drugs as the public-health concern
they really are. As detailed in Michael Massing's wonderful history of the
war on drugs, "The Fix," the Nixon administration was the unlikely
high-water mark of sane drug-control strategy, for it focused the
government's efforts overwhelmingly on treatment.

But in the years since, we have flipped our spending priorities; now only a
third of our efforts go to treatment and prevention, the rest to
interdiction and law enforcement. Ever since the Reagan administration, we
have told drug addicts to pull themselves together, while systematically
reducing the resources available to help them do it.

A sane national conversation about drugs would incorporate the best ideas
of the "harm reduction" movement (needle exchange programs, the insight
that we will never eradicate the human impulse to self-medicate); a
hard-headed, realistic emphasis on treatment programs that have proven
their effectiveness; and a nuanced message to teenagers that marijuana is a
lesser but still real danger to their young bodies and lives.

But voters who don't bear the burdens of the war on drugs - that is to say,
middle- and upper-middle-class Americans - don't seem very eager to have
this conversation. Boomers want to think of drugs as something that belongs
to the past, something that was okay for us, at our unique cultural moment,
but that is now assigned by stern social consensus to a place beyond the
pale, where our kids can't get at it. And so we allow our leaders their
hypocrisies, and they in turn let us nurture our own.

Next time you feel the impulse to wave this issue away, try an exercise:
Imagine, if you will, a female candidate for national office.

She is antiabortion. Reporters learn that when she was 27, she had an
abortion herself. What would they do?

They would crucify her, for starters.

They sure wouldn't let her describe it as a mistake she may or may not have
made.