A Lost Chance to Debate A Cruel Drug Policy

By Richard Cohen

WASHINGTON In the HelmsWeld heavyweight fight, almost everyone won.
Jesse Helms won because he got his way. William Weld, the former
Massachusetts governor, won because he got national exposure for his likely
presidential run, and President Bill Clinton won because he split the
Republican Party and managed, once again, to take a nonposition
positionthis time in favor of both Mr. Weld and Mr. Helms. So who lost?
We did.

We the people of the United States lost, and not only because Mr. Helms, a
man with a brick for a brain, was able to cow the entire Senate. We lost
because the issues that so vexed Mr. Helms and caused him to deny Mr. Weld
a hearingthe medicinal use of marijuana and needle exchange programs for
intravenous drug userswere not even debated. Mr. Weld favors them both,
and this, we are told, is why Mr. Helms hates him so.

But Mr. Weld is right, and Mr. Helms is wrong. Mr. Helms's compassion and
concern for human life, so evident in his furious opposition to abortion,
nevertheless excludes drug addicts for some reason. Maybe he thinks they
deserve to die.

True, they are junkies, but the fact remains that they risk their lives
every time they use a shared needle. With the drug, they may also be
getting HIV. Their deaths, both cruel and protracted, are more often than
not going to come at the expense of the public. Their lives could be saved
with needle exchange programs.

Study after study shows this to be the casefrom one by New York's Beth
Israel Hospital to a review by a panel of the National Institutes of
Health. It stands to reason that if drug users are going to share needles,
they are also going to share an HIV risk. If, on the other hand, they use
clean needles, they are not going to get anything more from an injection
than the drug they so crave.

The opposition to needle exchange programs is not so much scientific as it
is moralistic. To some people, it seems just wrong to aid addicts in their
addictions. But nq evidence suggests that needle exchange programs abet
drug usage, while plenty of evidence suggests that addicts will use
whatever is available to satisfy their craving. In this case, a perfectly
understandable moral argument is rebutted by some hard facts.

The argument in favor of the medicinal use of marijuana is nQt quite as
strongbut nonetheless it is persuasive. Some studies indicate that
marijuana has a medical benefit for cancer patients and glaucoma sufferers
reducing pain and the ill effects of chemotherapy. Others suggest that
anything that can be done by marijuana can be done just as well by
otherlegaldrugs.

But the fact remains that people who have used pot for medicinal purposes
swear by it. Richard Brookhiser, a senior contributing editor at the very
conservative National Review, used marijuana to relieve the nausea of
chemotherapy for testicular cancer.

It would be one thing if the drug under discussion was both rare and
extremely addictive. But marijuana is as common as red ties in Washington.
About 70 million Americans have, as they say, experimented. As for its
addictive qualities, they are largely exaggerated. Some people, predisposed
in some way, apparently do get hooked. The same case, though, can be made
against alcoholand in spades, about cigarettes.

In both casesneedle exchange and the medicinal use of marijuanaMr.
Helms is not only dead wrong but also cruel. He personifies the
unwillingness of the political establishment to distinguish between drugs
that are very bad and drugs that are not so bad, and its insistence on
treating our national drug crisis mostly as a criminal justice matter and
not as a public health issue. It is silliness to the point of cruelty to
make a criminal out of a desperate cancer patient. Mr. Weld gave Mr.
Clinton an opportunity to make those points. But the president apparently
once shared a needle with a political coward, and so he has said nothing on
the subject. His drug policy has gone from nonexistent in his first
termnot a single public service message to mindless in the second.

As for Mr. Weld, he conducts himself like a pedigreed cat haughty,
independent and sufficient unto himself. He lost his ambassadorship and,
probably the patience of the White House but he did not lose as much as the
rest of us didthe chance to discuss a drug policy that is both inhumane
and illogical.