THE POLITICS OF POT A GOVERNMENT IN DENIAL

There is more and more proof that marijuana is NOT A KILLER WEED, and yet
in Bill Clinton's America, the number of pot arrests has more than doubled

IN THE CLOSING DAYS OF 1998, a number of events exposed the profound
irrationality of America's war on marijuana. During the second week of
November, The Lancet, Great Britain's leading medical journal, published a
thorough analysis of marijuana's harmful effects. The Lancet warned that
people who smoke pot every day for years may develop bronchitis; may face
an increased risk of cancers of the lung, throat and Mouth; may become
psychologically dependent on the drug; and may experience subtle
impairments of their memory. The journal said that marijuana should not be
used by pregnant women, troubled teenagers, alcoholics, schizophrenics,
people with asthma - or anyone about to drive a motor vehicle. But the
editors of The Lancet argued that the dangers of smoking pot have to be
viewed in a larger perspective: Marijuana is "less of a threat to health
than alcohol or tobacco, products that in many countries are ... tolerated
and advertised." On the basis of the available medical evidence, The Lancet
concluded that "moderate indulgence in cannabis has little ill effect on
health."

A week after the Lancet article appeared, the FBI released the latest data
on marijuana arrests in the United States. In 1997 roughly 695,000 people
were arrested for pot - by far the largest number in American history. In
1992, the year before Bill Clinton took office, 342,000 were arrested.
Eighty-seven percent of the 1997 arrests were for possession of marijuana,
a crime that usually involves less than an ounce of pot. The cost of those
marijuana arrests - not including the cost of any imprisonment after a
conviction - may approach $3 billion. Under the leadership of the first
U.S. president who has admitted to smoking pot, more Americans have been
imprisoned for marijuana crimes than at any other time in our history.
Twice as many people have been arrested for marijuana during the Clinton
presidency as were during the entire presidency of Richard Nixon.

Even though the rise in teenage marijuana use has sparked a great deal of
publicity, the level of marijuana use among the general population has
actually remained stable for years. Part of the recent increase in
marijuana arrests may be explained by heightened police attention to
quality of life" violations. In New York, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's "zero
tolerance" policy toward marijuana has led to an eightfold increase in pot
arrests since 1992. The crackdown on marijuana use also reflects policies
embraced by the Clinton administration and the Republican-dominated
Congress. Legislation passed at the end of 1998 escalated the war on
marijuana, expanding the scope of workplace drug testing, funding research
on new forms of biological warfare on marijuana plants and cutting off
student loans to convicted pot smokers. The war on marijuana is being
driven not by what the drug actually does to your body but by what it
symbolizes. This is a war on 1960s counterculture, old hippies, non
conformists and a wide variety of people the right wing has long considered
"un-American."

Twenty years ago the decriminalization of marijuana was supported by
moderate politicians in both parties.

They argued that possession of marijuana in small amounts, for personal
use, should be treated more like a parking violation than like a criminal
offense. The rationale for decriminalization seemed obvious: The harms
caused by the nation's marijuana laws should not be worse than the harms
caused by the drug itself. In 1972, a bipartisan commission appointed by
President Nixon called for the decriminalization of marijuana - a
recommendation that Nixon flatly rejected. Nevertheless, eleven states
decriminalized marijuana in the 197Os, and thirty-five others began to
consider such legislation. The American Medical Association, the American
Bar Association and the National Council of Churches endorsed
decriminalization, as did President Jimmy Carter. In October 1977, the
Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize marijuana. But the
committee reversed its decision a week later, after strenuous objections by
Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah.

While mainstream American opinion favored decriminalization, the far right
thought that marijuana posed a grave threat to the moral fiber of the
nation. Sen. James 0. Eastland, D-Miss., argued that the "marijuana-hashish
epidemic" was being spread by left wing "subversive groups" and that it
threatened to turn America's youth into brain-damaged "semizombies." Ronald
Reagan, then governor of California, shared these views and in 1972 vetoed
legislation that would have reduced that state's penalties for possessing
marijuana. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan took a hard line
against marijuana, claiming that medical researchers viewed pot as
"probably the most dangerous drug in America today." President Reagan's War
on Drugs began in 1982 as a war on marijuana. His first drug czar, Carlton
Turner, blamed marijuana for young people's involvement in
"antibig-business, anti-authority demonstrations." Turner also thought that
smoking pot could transform young men into homosexuals.

Condemning marijuana became an easy way for baby-boomer politicians to
distance themselves from the 1960s youth counterculture. It became a means
of demonstrating their true "Americanism." As marijuana use declined across
the country, there seemed to be little political benefit in protecting
marijuana users from criminal sanctions. The War on Drugs increasingly
began to resemble the 50s anti-Communist crusade - another
government-sponsored witch hunt aimed at political non conformists. By the
time President Reagan left office, in 1988, every member of Congress and
every candidate for higher office had to anticipate being asked, "Are you
now or have you ever been a pot smoker?"

In 1981, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., introduced a bill that would have
legalized the medicinal use of marijuana. Fifteen years later, as speaker
of the House, Gingrich sponsored a bill demanding a life sentence - or the
death penalty - for anyone bringing more than two ounces of marijuana into
the United States. Today the heirs to the Reagan revolution in Congress are
setting the nation's marijuana policy. Republican Sgn. Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky and Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, also a Republican, have consistently
been two of pot's fiercest critics. McConnell has tried, without success,
to make the federal penalties for selling or possessing marijuana
equivalent to those for selling or possessing cocaine and heroin. Barr has
fought hard to thwart any government research into what he terms the
"so-called medical use of marijuana." He claims that attempts to study the
therapeutic value of pot are part of a vast conspiracy. "All civilized
countries in the world," Barr says, "are under assault by drug proponents
seeking to enslave citizens." McConnell and Barr both come from major
tobacco-growing states. Although approximately 400,000 Americans die every
year from smoking cigarettes, the two politicians have focused their
energies on demonizing marijuana) . Uana - a drug that, in 5,000 years of
recorded use, has never been credibly linked to a single death through
overdose or acute toxicity.

The newly elected speaker of the House, Republican Rep. J. Dennis Hastert
of Illinois, has been widely portrayed in the media as a kind and
well-meaning moderate. Little attention has been paid to Hastert's role
last year as chairman of Newt Gingrich, s Task Force for a Drug-Free
America. During the 1998 congressional campaign, Hastert led the effort to
portray the Clinton administration as "soft on drugs." At a press
conference with Gary Bauer, chairman of the right-wing Christian Family
Research Council, Hastert called upon America to "kick this destructive
habit" and later called marijuana a "poison." In response to reports that
perhaps seventy percent of the players in the National Basketball
Association regularly smoke pot, Hastert proclaimed a Drug-Free Athletes,
Celebrities and Role Models week. That same week, his Republican colleagues
introduced the clumsily named Professional and Olympic Athlete
Responsibility Resolution. The measure proposed that athletes caught with
marijuana be required to turn in the person who sold them the pot or face a
one-year suspension from competition.

The speaker's Task Force for a Drug-Free America did not have much effect
on the 1998 election results, largely because the Clinton administration
has worked very hard to appear tough on drugs. Donna Shalala, the most
liberal member of Clinton's Cabinet, has led the administration's
anti-marijuana efforts, assuming the moralistic role once played by Nancy
Reagan. As a college student in the 1960s, Shalala smoked marijuana. As
chancellor of the University of Wisconsin in 1990, she told Time magazine
that "we see . . . kids getting into trouble with drugs, but it's nowhere
near the range and depth that the alcohol problem is." As secretary of
Health and Human Services, Shalala has changed her tune, focusing more on
teenage marijuana use - despite the fact that American eighth-graders drink
alcohol more than twice as often as they smoke marijuana. "Marijuana is
illegal, dangerous, unhealthy and wrong," she has asserted at various press
conferences and congressional appearances. "It's a one-way ticket to
dead-end hopes and dreams." Shalala has worked closely with Senator Hatch
on the issue of marijuana use and has further politicized the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, an organization that funds most of the world's
original research on the health effects of illegal drugs. NIDA is supposed
to remain politically impartial and maintain scientific objectivity. At a
1996 press conference staged at the Jelleff Boys and Girls Club in
Washington, D.C., Shalala surrounded herself with small children and
inadvertently revealed how the war on marijuana has affected the spirit of
scientific inquiry. "We're supporting a major research agenda," she said,
11 to deflate all the myths that marijuana and other drugs don't cause
lasting harm."

The new drug-war legislation, passed by Congress last October and signed
into law by President Clinton, contains a number of the provisions
advocated by the Task Force for a Drug-Free America. Total spending for the
War on Drugs this year will reach $17 billion, an all-time record. Among
other things, Congress authorized the spending Of $23 million for research
on mycoherbicides - soil-based fungi designed in laboratories to destroy
marijuana, poppy and coca plants, They are meant to kill these plants
without harming people, animals or nearby vegetation. Many Republicans in
the House and Senate believe this new form of biological warfare may prove
to be -the silver bullet" in the nation's crusade against drugs,

'The whole scheme is reminiscent of the chemical warfare that was waged
against marijuana twenty years ago. In the late 1970s, excess supplies of a
military defoliant called paraquat, left over from the Vietnam War, were
given to Mexico by the U.S. Government. Through a program subsidized by the
United States, paraquat was widely sprayed from airplanes onto marijuana
fields south of the border. But Mexican pot growers soon learned that
harvesting their crop immediately after a spraying prevented its
destruction. The program was discontinued in 1978 when the U.S. Public
Health Service disclosed that smoking marijuana laced with paraquat could
cause irreversible lung damage. An eradication program designed to wipe out
marijuana growing instead shifted much of it to fields within the United
States - as smokers avoided Mexican pot - thereby turning marijuana into
one of America's largest cash crop~. The long-term consequences of spraying
the new mycoherbicides are bound to be equally unpredictable.

The Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1998 provides federal funds to small
businesses that want to impose drug testing on their employees. The rise of
drug testing has been one of the most extraordinary aspects of the war on
marijuana. A decade ago about three percent of the Fortune 200 corporations
tested their workers and job applicants for drug use; today ninety-eight
percent of these companies do. Almost half of the nation's workers are
subject to drug testing. Marijuana is used more frequently in the United
States than all other illegal drugs combined. As a result, marijuana is the
drug detected in the vast majority of positive tests. The drug tests
administered by most large corporations and the federal government cannot
determine whether a person is stoned; the metabolytes of marijuana remain
in a user's bloodstream for days or even weeks after pot has been smoked.
Someone who has smoked a joint on a Saturday night can easily fail a drug
test the following Monday morning. The huge drug-testing system now
governing the American workplace cannot reveal whether you have ever been
stoned on the job. It only reveals whether you are the sort of person who
likes to smoke pot. The current drug-testing regime blacklists pot smokers
and prevents them from gaining employment, regardless of how they might
perform on the job. Meanwhile, a person who downs ten shots of tequila
every night of the week does not face the same denial of employment.
Indeed, a recent study Of 14,000 employees at seven major U.S. corporations
found that eight percent of the hourly workers and almost twenty-five
percent of the managers routinely consume alcohol on the job.

The Institute for a Drug- Free Workplace has helped Congress draft new laws
to expand drug testing and has fought nationwide against state laws that
restrict an employer's ability to test workers. Five of the twelve
companies on the institute's board of directors are pharmaceutical firms
that handle drug tests. An industry that did not exist until the late i980s
now earns about $340 million in annual revenues.

The Drug-Free Student Loan Amendment took effect last October. It denies
student loans to anyone caught with any amount of pot. Existing laws
already deny almost 500 federal benefits to pot offenders, including
small-business loans, professional licenses, farm subsidies and food
stamps. President Clinton's one-strike-andyou're-out law gives authorities
the power to evict a person convicted of a pot crime from public housing.
In at least twenty states, federally mandated "smoke a joint, lose your
license" statutes now suspend a person's driving license after a conviction
for any marijuana crime, regardless of where that person was busted. Being
caught smoking a joint on the couch in your living room with your car
safely parked in the driveway can lead to a harsher punishment than being
arrested for driving drunk.

Under the newly enacted student loan law, a person convicted for possession
of marijuana can become eligible once again for a student loan only after
one year, following the completion of drug rehab and two surprise drug
tests. A second conviction for possession of marijuana leads to two years
of ineligibility; a third conviction leads to a denial of student loans
indefinitely. Convicted murderers, rapists and child molesters, however,
remain fully eligible for these loans.

Those who suffer most from the war on pot tend to be poor or working-class
people. They cannot avoid prison by hiring costly attorneys and can be
devastated by the loss of state or federal benefits. In 1997, Gary Martin
was arrested in Manchester, Connecticut, and charged with possession of
marijuana. Almost twenty years earlier, he had been severely beaten during
a robbery, resulting in permanent brain damage,

After the beating, he endured a series of strokes, which left his right
side paralyzed. He developed circulatory problems and his left leg was
amputated. Martin regularly smoked marijuana to relieve "phantom pains" in
his amputated leg. After being arrested for possessing less than four
ounces of pot, he was evicted from his apartment at a special housing
complex for the elderly and disabled. None of the doctors or nurses
treating Martin was told in advance of his eviction. They would have
lobbied the authorities on his behalf. "Kicking this guy out of his
apartment for pot," says Hartford Courant reporter Tom Condon, "was just
pathetic."

The offspring of important government officials, however, tend to avoid
severe punishments for their marijuana crimes. In 1982, the year that
President Reagan launched the war on marijuana, his chief of staff's son
was arrested for selling marijuana. John C. Baker, the son of future
Secretary of State James Baker III, sold a small amount of pot - around a
quarter of an ounce - to an undercover cop at the family's ranch in Texas.
Under state law, John Baker faced a possible felony charge and a prison
term of between two and twenty years. Instead, he was charged with a
misdemeanor, pleaded guilty and was fined $2,000. In 1980, Republican Rep.
Dan Burton of Indiana introduced legislation that would require the death
penalty for drug dealers. "We must educate our children about the dangers
of drugs," Burton said, "and impose tough new penalties on dealers." Four
years later his son was arrested while transporting nearly eight pounds of
marijuana from Texas to Indiana. Burton hired an attorney for his son.
While awaiting trial in that case, Danny Burton III was arrested again,
only five months later, for his growing thirty marijuana plants in is
Indianapolis apartment. Police also found a shotgun in the apartment. Under
federal law, Danny Burton faced a possible mandatory minimum sentence of
five years in prison just for the gun, plus up to three years in prison
under state law for all the pot. Federal charges were never filed against
Burton, who wound up receiving a milder sanction: a term of community
service, probation and house arrest. When the son of Richard W. Riley (the
former South Carolina governor who became Clinton's secretary of education)
was indicted in 1992 on federal charges of conspiring to sell cocaine and
marijuana, he faced ten years to life in prison and a fine Of $4 million.
Instead, Richard Riley Jr. received six months of house arrest.

In September 1996, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., attacked
President Clinton for being "cavalier" toward illegal drugs and for
appointing too many "soft on crime" liberal judges. "We must get tough on
drug dealers," he declared. "Those who peddle destruction on our children
must pay dearly." Four months later, his son Todd Cunningham was arrested
by the Drug Enforcement Administration after helping to transport 400
pounds of marijuana from California to Massachusetts. Although Todd
Cunningham confessed to having been part of a smuggling ring that had
shipped at much as ten tons of pot throughout the U.S. - a crime that can
lead to a life sentence without parole - he was charged only with
distributing 400 pounds of pot. The prosecutor in his case recommended a
sentence of fourteen months at a boot camp and a halfway house.
Representative Cunningham begged the judge for leniency. "My son has a good
heart," he said, fighting back tears. "Hes never been in trouble before."

Todd Cunningham was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. He might
have received an even shorter sentence had he not tested positive for
cocaine three times while out on bail. "The sentence Todd got had nothing
to do with who Duke is," says the congressman's Press secretary. "Duke has
always been tough on drugs and remains tough on drugs."

IN 1973, OREGON BECAME THE FIRST state to decriminalize marijuana. Other
states soon followed, including California, Ohio, Mississippi and North
Carolina. A number of studies later found that states that decriminalized
marijuana did not experience a higher rate of pot use than states with
tough marijuana laws. In 1994, Republicans gained control of the Oregon
legislature after forty years as the minority party and quickly set about
toughening the state's marijuana laws. They hoped this would send a
symbolic message to the state's youth. In June 1997, the Oregon legislature
voted by more than two to one to recriminalize marijuana, with Republicans
and Democrats supporting a bill that turned possession of marijuana into a
crime punishable by a jail sentence. John Kitzhaber, the state's Democratic
governor, reluctantly signed the legislation, unwilling to veto it and risk
appearing soft on drugs.

Drug-reform activists immediately began to collect signatures for a
statewide referendum on the issue, arguing that the voters should determine
the state's policy on marijuana. That signature drive yielded Measure 57, a
ballot initiative on the recriminalization of marijuana. The state GOP, the
Portland Oregonian and a group called Oregonians Against Dangerous Drugs
supported a yes vote on the measure.

State Rep. Floyd Prozanski, a Democrat from Eugene, was one of the few
elected officials in Oregon willing to speak out against making marijuana
possession a crime. A former assistant district attorney, he criticized the
scare tactics being used by Measure 57 supporters and later warned, "If
kids don't believe you about marijuana why should they believe you about
other drugs, like crystal meth, which are really are dangerous?"

No major political figure in Oregon advocated voting no on Measure 57.
Nonetheless, on Election Day, the state's voters repudiated their
legislature and backed the decriminalization Of marijuana, by a margin of
two to one.

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID THAT THE first casualty of every war is the truth.
The American war on marijuana provides a fine example. No major newspaper
in the United States has thus far mentioned The Lancet's conclusions about
the actual harms of smoking pot Last year another British journal, New
Scientist, revealed that sections

World Health Organization report On marijuana had been suppressed at the
last minute. The U.N. agency's report had concluded that marijuana is safer
than alcohol and tobacco; American officials at the National Institute on
Drug Abuse called for the removal of those passages, claiming they would
encourage groups campaigning to legalize marijuana. A subsequent editorial
in New Scientist criticized "the anti-dope propaganda that circulates in
the U.S." and called for the decriminalization of marijuana. More than a
decade ago, one NIDA researcher told Scientific American of the constant
pressure to uncover pot's harmful effects: "Never has so much money been
spent trying to find something wrong with a drug and produced so few results."

American voters seem to be moving toward a marijuana policy guided by
common sense, not vindictiveness. Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have
decriminalized marijuana, and their civilizations have not yet collapsed. A
rational policy is not difficult to describe: Pot use should be discouraged
without criminalizing users. Possessing small amounts of marijuana for
personal use should no longer be a crime. Scarce prison cells should be
reserved for violent and dangerous offenders. Much like alcoholism, drug
abuse should be regarded as a public-health issue, not as a problem to be
solved by the criminal justice system. After two decades of official lies,
an end to the war on marijuana is unlikely to come from Congress or the
Clinton administration. Any meaningful change will begin at the state and
local levels, where initiatives give voters real power and where citizen
activism can overcome the timidity of elected officials. According to Allen
St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws, decriminalization efforts are about to begin in
Connecticut, New Hampshire, Arkansas and Illinois. This war is over, if you
want it.