FIVE MYTHS ABOUT HIGH TIMES

Americans have historical amnesia of a general variety, but the
blackout is particularly acute when it comes to what our grandparents,
and their grandparents, did to get high.

Forty years after Woodstock, the nation is taking a fresh look at its
twisted relationship with drugs and insobriety. But we're doing so
without drawing lessons from the centuries of experience we have with
inebriation and the effort to control it. Five widespread myths must
be dispensed with if America ever plans on making rational drug policy.

1.) America's drug problem began in the late 1960s.

Drugs (other than booze) first went mainstream in the early to
mid-19th century. The father of the opium boom -- or, more accurately,
the mother -- was the temperance movement. Pressured by the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League, religious leaders
and other advocates, Americans put down the bottle, and drinking
plummeted by a half to three-quarters.

They got high instead. In 1872, the Massachusetts State Board of
Health noted that "between 1840 and 1850, soon after teetotalism had
become a fixed fact ... our own importations of opium swelled."

When opium started causing problems, in came morphine, marketed as a
nonaddictive alternative. When that proved patently false, Bayer's
heroin was sold as a nonaddictive substitute for morphine. Sears,
Roebuck and Co. was slinging cocaine kits, complete with powder and
syringe. In 1885, Parke-Davis promised, quite rightly, that its
cocaine could "supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the
silent eloquent."

2.) President Richard Nixon is to blame for the war on
drugs.

Nixon's declaration was nothing new. Americans have been waging war
against their love of inebriation since before they were Americans.

In 1619, Virginia got it going by banning "playing dice, cards,
drunkenness, idleness, and excess in apparel."

Founding Father Benjamin Rush typified the contradictions of the
American war against getting high; the physician's famous anti-liquor
treatise in 1785 contained kind words for beer and wine: "generally
innocent, and often have a friendly influence upon health and life."

The nation's first uprising revolved around sobriety, when George
Washington put down the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion.

Temperance movements, led by women, left men unsure that they wanted
to share the franchise. "I am not sure how I will vote, but think I
will vote against suffrage," Sen. Warren Harding of Ohio said in 1916,
according to a contemporaneous article in the Nation magazine. "I
don't see how I can vote for suffrage and against prohibition." He
voted for prohibition and, as president during the dry spell, held
regular whiskey and poker nights.

3.) Legalization will increase teen drug use.

But the children! Californians fretted loudly in 1996 that the state's
new medical marijuana law would lead to an increase in teen
pot-smoking, so the state studied it closely.

The attorney general's office first look a year later found no effect.
The office looked again a decade later. Teen use had collapsed.

Among seventh- and 11th-graders, the number of kids saying they'd
smoked in the last month fell by a quarter; among ninth-graders, it
fell by 47 per cent. Bigger declines were found in weekly and annual
use. In almost every other state that passed a medical marijuana law,
pot-smoking among children declined faster than in states that didn't.

4.) In foreign countries, legalization has been disastrous.

First, no country has ever completely legalized drugs, not since
global treaties were signed a century ago ushering in
prohibition.

In Holland, drug laws are still on the books, but a social pact
between the government and the people keeps shops from getting busted.

In 2001, Portugal became the first European country to abolish drug
laws when it repealed criminal penalties for pot, cocaine, heroin and
methamphetamine. The United Nations suggested that the new law could
be a treaty violation and would lead to crime, a spike in addiction
and a rise in "drug tourism."

But the country didn't fully legalize. People caught with drugs still
had to go to a magistrate and face a small penalty. But they wouldn't
go to jail.

Now the United Nations is lauding Portugal. In its most recent World
Drug Report, it says, "These conditions keep drugs out of the hands of
those who would avoid them under a system of full prohibition, while
encouraging treatment, rather than incarceration, for users."

The report also noted that the policy had not led to an increase in
drug tourism and that "a number of drug-related problems have decreased."

5.) Americans aren't ready for legalization.

While pot-smoking peaked in the late '70s, legalization never came
close to being a majority position. This country has fewer pot smokers
today -- a University of Michigan study found that marijuana use among
18- to 20-year-olds dropped by nearly half from the late '70s to today
- -- but polls show support at about 50 per cent for taxing and
regulating marijuana as we do alcohol.

But Americans have a dim view of their neighbors' enlightenment, an
appraisal that shines through in research by Zogby in Rhode Island and
Vermont.

The survey, paid for by the Marijuana Policy Project (my onetime
employer), interviewed 501 likely voters in Rhode Island and 502 in
Vermont. It found 69 and 71 per cent support for medical marijuana,
respectively. No surprise. But Zogby asked one last question:
Regardless of your own opinion, do you think a majority in your state
support or oppose medical marijuana? In Vermont, 38 per cent of people
thought a majority backed it; a quarter of Rhode Islanders guessed
their fellow citizens supported medical pot.

Americans are ready. They just don't know it yet.