POLITICIANS AND PRESS MUST END PRETENSES ABOUT DRUGS

Gary E. Johnson for president! Who's he? The Republican governor of New
Mexico and just about the only politician with the gumption to admit he used
marijuana and cocaine in his youth and lived to tell the tale. Unlike too
many hypocrites of his generation, Johnson has the guts to challenge that
monumental tribute to bureaucratic stupidity known as the war on drugs, a
$40 billion program that's made America the world's biggest jailer of
innocent people.

Johnson, 46, has pledged to retire from politics when his second term as
governor ends, so a presidential run is unlikely. But his honesty stands in
startling relief to politicians of both parties who act as if ignorance of
the effects of drugs is a prerequisite to wisdom on the subject.

Pretending never to have tried illegal drugs makes it easier to demonize all
banned drugs as equally destructive and far more threatening to public order
than socially condoned alcohol. Ignorance about drug abuse makes it easier
to treat it as a criminal rather than medical problem. John-son boasts no
such igno-rance.

"I smoked marijuana in college: that was some-thing I did," he told New York
Times last week, adding, "I used co-caine on a couple of occasions. It was
not something that anybody would have ever known. But I knew if I was going
to run for office, I should fess up. And if I didn't win, so be it."

Which is what George W. Bush and Bill Clinton should have had the temerity
to say concerning their own drug experience. Users or not, they were of a
generation that survived wide experimentation with drugs, and it's unseemly
that they're now willing to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of
young people by throwing them in jail for doing what was common in their day.

Clinton has pushed the drug crusade with a fervor sadly lacking in other
areas, beginning most strikingly with indifference to the poverty that
leaves ghetto youths vulnerable to seductions of the drug trade. Bush, as
governor of Texas, has pushed for increasing penalties for drug use.

But if Bush were honest, he'd have to admit that his youthful encounter with
the drug culture - even if it was as innocent as knowing the stuff was
around fraternity row paled in significance to his entanglement, with
alcohol. Whatever attraction illegal drugs held did not last, he tells us,
past his 28th year, but alcohol was a severe enough problem that he felt
compelled to go cold turkey at 40. Clearly in his experience. booze was the
hard one to shake.

That's the experience of most Americans. All evidence indicates that for
many. alcohol addiction is far more enduring and destructive. According to
drug czar Barry McCaffrey, “Probably 70 million Americans have used an
illegal drug - one-third of all Americans age 12 and over. Americans who
once tried an illegal drug overwhelmingly have walked away from drug abuse."
That's not an argument for using illegal drugs but a recognition that
they're not so addictive as McCaffrey's hysterical anti-drug crusade insists.

Abuse of any drug is of serious concern, but it remains fundamentally a
medical not a criminal problem, and the pathology of the disease varies with
individuals. Criminal law should concern the immense adverse social
consequence of abuse, say in the form of wife beating or auto accidents. and
on that score, attention should turn primarily to alcohol.

Alcohol causes more than 100.000 deaths a year, while federal statistics
report no deaths due solely to marijuana use. Laws that deal with the
consequence of drug use –for example, driving under the influence --should
be firmly enforced. But drug-induced escapism is no business of the cops.

Clearly, our drug policy is an inconsistent hodgepodge. But we will not
begin to seriously re-examine this question until politicians, and the
reporters who cover them, come out of the closet and share their own
experiences on the subject. Many of us know more about how wrongheaded the
drug policy debate is from our own experience than been willing to admit.
How many reporters hounding Bush these past weeks can honestly say they
never used illegal drugs or deny that alcohol, which flows freely on every
campaign press plane, has not been a greater scourge in their lives? I can't.

If Bush would come clean and tell us he really knows about drug use, it
would be one good reason to vote for the man. But I don't expect it. He's no
Gary E. Johnson