WHAT DO WE TELL THE KIDS ...

... or the voters about drug use in the past?

The recent media fooforah about U.S. presidential wannabe George W.
Bush's supposedly long ago, supposedly irresponsible, supposed
"experiments" with drugs of a recreational if illegal nature has
touched off yet another round of that peculiar brand of
forelock-tugging, knicker-twisting angst common to aging boomer-parent
punditi.

Oh, God, they ask plaintively, what-oh-what should we tell the
kids?

The question, of course, has to do with The Terrible Truth that once,
long ago and far away - before we all became respectable, responsible,
God-fearing, too-much taxpaying teachers and preachers and business
executives and janitors and police officers and judges and doctors and
newspaper columnists - a few of us might have smoked the occasional
joint. And, worse, maybe even enjoyed it. Before, of course, we woke
up to The Terrible Truth that all drugs are not only equally bad for
us but that all of them will also inevitably and inexorably suck
haplessly helpless indulgers into a cesspool of wasted, wasteful lives
of crime, sin and degradation (our own current sun-dappled,
clean-living suburban existences excepted, of course).

Thanks to controversy over the drug histories of Bill
(I-didn't-inhale) Clinton and George W. (that-was-so-long-ago) Bush,
we middle-aged boomers must now come face to face with teenaged
children who want to know, as teenaged children sometimes do: Daddy,
what did you do in the war on drugs? Oh God, what-oh-what should we
tell the kids?

Bruce Bomier, the author of a book - I kid you not, they really write
books about this stuff - entitled Marijuana and the Responsible Parent
warns solemnly that "we need to confront George W.'s dilemma in our
own homes."

"It's a dilemma," adds Jerry Adler, writing in the Sept. 6 edition of
Newsweek, "because for most parents, the answers represent a choice of
competing hypocrisies. Telling the truth involves admitting you've
done things yourself that you won't permit your child to do. But many
parents feel uncomfortable lying to their children - especially in the
context of asking a child to tell the truth about his habits."

"The worst thing is to lie to your kid and have them find out later,"
explains Dr. Pedro Jose Greer - implying, of course, that the initial
lie itself is somehow far from that worst thing.

To save yourself from having to lie, Ariel White-Kovich, the executive
director of youth services at the Hazeldon Foundation, an addiction
research and treatment organization, advises Newsweek readers: "You
can say, `I'm simply not prepared to discuss this. It's my personal
business from the past.'" Oh, puh-lease.

Bogus debate

The real competing hypocrisies here seem to me not so much between
lying to your kids or telling them the truth as between telling the
truth to your kids about your drug use or lying to yourself about what
you know from experience is a largely bogus debate about the dangers
of recreational drug use.

I, for one, worry far less about whether my kids choose to smoke
marijuana - provided only that they do so after they are mature enough
to have thought through that choice - than I am about them smoking
conventional plain, old, over-the-drugstore-counter cigarettes.

Smoking completely legal yet lethal cigarettes is what killed my
father. After a lifetime of smoking, he died a horrible death years
before what might otherwise have been his time. He spent his last six
months in a hospital breathing only with the aid of machines.

I smoked for 16 years. I quit in 1981, the year he died. I can still
remember how difficult it was for me to give up that addiction.

I have also smoked marijuana. I did inhale. And, yes, I did enjoy
it.

But, in the end, when I decided rum and Diet Coke would be my high of
choice, I suffered none of the physical, psychological withdrawals I
went through with cigarettes.

I still have plenty of friends - otherwise respectable, responsible,
God-fearing, too-much-taxpaying teachers and preachers and business
executives and janitors and police officers and judges and doctors and
newspaper columnists - who prefer an occasional joint to a beer, and
somehow manage to lead healthy, productive lives.

They are no more - or less - likely to become hooked on their weed
than I am on my rum. And we're both probably far less likely to do
ourselves harm than those who persist in smoking cigarettes.

No one, of course, asks political candidates to come clean on their
past legal smoking habits, or asks them when they're going to get
tough on cigarette peddlers, or challenges them to defend their
campaign contributions from big tobacco.

Those who want to be president of the United States, however, must not
only lie, or at least fudge their own youthful drug biographies, but
they must also pretend that even occasional soft drug use will do to
the rest of the world all the terrible things it did not do to them,
and must therefore declare themselves foursquare in favour of the
phony war on drugs.

Poetic justice

When the blood-sniffing media sharks first began circling around
George W. Bush over rumours of his past drug use, I confess I felt
sorry for the man. Who cared? But the more I read about his track
record as governor of Texas - his draconian, politically inspired drug
laws - the more I came to see it as a kind of poetic justice.

The price of hypocrisy is more hypocrisy.

It's just too bad we all have to pay the price.