A WHOLE LOT OF US NEED TO COME CLEAN

Drugs: Bush, the reporters hounding him and many of the rest of us could
help national policy by first being honest.

Gary E. Johnson for president! Who's he? The Republican governor of New
Mexico and just about the only politician in the country 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. Johnson boasts no
such ignorance.

"I smoked marijuana in college; that was something I did," he told the New
York Times last week, adding, "I used cocaine 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 practice in
their day.

Clinton has pushed the drug crusade with a fervor sadly lacking in other
areas of endeavor, beginning most strikingly with indifference to the
poverty that leaves ghetto youth 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 the age of 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 socially destructive.
According to drug czar Barry R. 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 blindingly addictive as McCaffrey's
hysterical anti-drug crusade insists.

Abuse of any drug--illegal or not--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 that merely wastes one's time,
mind and body is no business of the cops.

Clearly, our drug policy is an inconsistent hodgepodge, causing more misery
than drugs themselves. But we will not begin to seriously reexamine 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 we've 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 what 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.