BUSH SHOULD FESS UP, HELP US CONFRONT DIFFICULT DRUG ISSUES

AS THE national media turn their laser beam on George W. Bush, it might be
well to recall how culturally acceptable marijuana, cocaine and LSD were --
and how ignorant we were about their dangers -- in the 1970s, when the
presidential candidate was ``young and irresponsible.''

In 1970, Congress repealed tough penalties on marijuana possession and
established a maximum penalty of one-year probation for first-time
possession. If probation were successfully completed, the proceedings would
be dismissed. That meant no record would remain of the offense for those 21
and younger.

In 1971, NORML -- the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
- -- was formed to press for legalization of marijuana. In 1973, the
congressionally mandated Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommended
that Congress decriminalize possession of marijuana for personal use, and
the cognoscenti applauded.

In 1977, President Carter asked Congress to eliminate criminal penalties for
possession of less than one ounce of marijuana and replace them with a $100
fine. Over the decade, 11 state legislatures representing about a third of
the U.S. population decriminalized marijuana. The Alaska Supreme Court held
that the privacy clause in its state constitution protected possession of
marijuana in the home for personal use.

At the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, we were more concerned
with herbicides used to kill marijuana than marijuana itself. As secretary,
I opposed the use of paraquat to kill marijuana plants because of official
findings indicating that the smoke of paraquat-contaminated marijuana likely
caused lung damage.

By the early l980s, more than 60 million Americans had tried illegal drugs,
including 50 million who had smoked pot. One in 10 high school seniors
smoked marijuana daily; nearly four in 10 were current smokers (had smoked
within the last month).

The number of regular cocaine users (at least monthly) in the late '70s and
early '80s was counted in millions. By 1982, 22 million Americans had tried
it. Several physicians, scientists and sophisticates said cocaine was a
non-addictive recreational drug. Rich college kids snorted it, as did Wall
Street investment bankers who found it allowed them to work incessantly with
little or no sleep. By the mid-1980s, the American people -- 5 percent of
the world's population -- were consuming 50 percent of the world's cocaine,
a rate that pretty much continues to this day.

Then, startled by the 1986 cocaine overdose of basketball star Len Bias, the
nation awoke to the impact of such widespread drug use. We learned that LSD
could fry the brain; that cocaine was indeed addictive (fiercely so, in
smoked form) and could incite users to paranoia and violence; and that
marijuana could savage short-term memory and ability to concentrate, stunt
emotional and intellectual development and increase the risk of using drugs
such as cocaine and heroin.

Older and wiser, the nation turned against drug use, revived and increased
criminal penalties, and mounted major public health campaigns to educate our
young about the dangers of drug abuse. By 1990, casual drug use had dropped
by half.

Against this backdrop, the remarkable thing about the current presidential
candidates is that so few smoked marijuana, and none (with the unknown
exception of George W.) snorted cocaine.

For George W., I have advice about how to negotiate the political white line
in 1999. Stop moving the stake in the ground (from won't respond, to seven
years, to 25 years); answer the question about whether you ever used
cocaine, and set out in depth what you believe our drug policies should be
in the context of the facts and experiences we know today, not the fantasies
and expectations we dreamed of in the 1970s.

Tell us your view of the dangers of those drugs: their addictive power; the
effectiveness of treatment; the ineffectiveness of interdiction; the role of
criminal laws, prisons and drug courts; and the importance of the family,
church, and school to battling drug use by kids. Tell us how we should
handle young people who try drugs or get hooked.

If George W. does that, I don't believe anyone will hold against him his
actions in swimming with the tide of 1970s naive nonsense about drugs.

Such action by George W. might lead to a historical first: a serious
discussion among the presidential candidates about drug policies that might
spark the kind of research effort and investment in treatment that the abuse
of all substances (illegal drugs, alcohol and nicotine) - -- the nation's
No. 1 disease and public health enemy -- deserves.

Califano, president of the National Center of Addiction and Substance Abuse
at Columbia University, was secretary of the Department of Health, Education
and Welfare from 1977 to 1979.