A GUIDE TO SANITY

Rick Steves is a travel guide and writer who lives in Edmonds, Washington,
and spends about 100 days abroad each year. His "Europe Through the Back
Door" books and TV shows on PBS are familiar to millions of viewers like
you. Steves is in his late 40s; sandy-haired, bespectacled, intelligent,
pragmatic and so calm that he seems slightly bemused even when he's
expressing outrage.

Two years ago Allen St. Pierre of NORML noticed Steves's name on the
membership list and invited him to join the advisory board and to talk at
the annual meeting. "I took my pastor out for a walk," said Steves on that
occasion, "And I explained to him that there's a lot of good Christians who
find marijuana actually helps them get closer to God... I think that was an
accomplishment there: to find a leader in your community who respects you,
but would be disinclined to understand what you're doing, and take the time
to explain to him. I'm trying to do that and I think we all need to do that."

At this year's NORML meeting in San Francisco, Steves reprised his
practical advice in a keynote talk, excerpted below.

Is there anyone better suited to begin guiding this country towards sanity?

BEGIN STEVES, HIS VOICE TO END

To me travel is accelerated living.

You make more friends and you learn more per day when you're away from home
than you do at home. Everything becomes very vivid.

When I'm in Europe for a month I can recall every meal. Can't do that when
I'm at home, it's just not that vivid....

Travel really challenges truth.

You're raised thinking certain truths are self-evident and God-given, and
then you get over there and you realize that people do things differently.
Travel rearranges your furniture.

I mean, you go to Bulgaria and this means yes (shaking his head) and that
means no (nodding). And you go to France and slow service means good
service. Slow service is respectful service -you've got the table all
night, take your time... You go to Belgium and they dip their French fries
into mayonnaise, they look at you strange if you ask for ketchup... I go
to Japan and I'm in a Raokan in the middle of the night and it's cold. They
don't heat their houses.

And you slip on your slippers and you put on your kimono and you shuffle
down the hallway you can see your breath, you're not looking forward to
sitting on the toilet, but the seat is heated.

That's a nice jolt... Travel carbonates your life. It makes things
different, it sort of refreshes your perspective and in a lot of ways,
that's like marijuana, I would say.

When I started teaching I wondered if it was a noble thing to teach rich
Americans to do. My image of travel when I was a kid was rich white
Americans on big cruise ships in the Caribbean throwing coins,
photographing black kids diving for those coins.

It was a way to flaunt your affluence.

Nobody thought twice about it. That's what travel was all about.

Even today that notion of travel persists.

For a lot of people, travel is: see if you can eat five miles a day and
still snorkel when you get into port. And that's not something I wanted to
promote.

I wanted to promote thoughtful travel.

In the last few years, thoughtful travel has become more important than
ever for Americans. I'm really committed to the notion that travel is a
constructive, healthy thing to do. That's nothing new. Fourteen hundred
years ago Mohamed said "Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how
much you've traveled." Thomas Jefferson said, "Travel makes a person
wiser, but less happy." Mark Twain traveled, and he said "Travel is fatal
to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." I travel and I think of it as
one of the last great sources of legal adventure.

When you travel you realize there's things to get excited about.

I grew up thinking cheese was the same size as the bread -and it's orange.

Then you go over there and they've got a different cheese for every day of
the year. You go into a cheese shop in Paris it's like a festival of mold.
I love hanging around with my restaurateur friends in Paris. I'm their
little American bumpkin and they can help me appreciate the fine points of
life. She takes me into the cheese shop and picks up the moldiest one. (As
if taking a deep whiff) "Oh, Rick, smell this cheese it smells like ze feet
of angels." Now, imagine thinking that cheese smells like ze feet of
angels! It just changes your perspective on things.

I was in Kabul, in Afghanistan. A professor sat down next to me and said,
"You're an American, aren't you?" I said "Yeah." He said, "I want you to
know that a third of the people on this planet eat with spoons and forks
like you do, a third of the people eat with chopsticks and third of the
people eat with their fingers like I do and we're all just as civilized." I
was thankful for that. He had a little chip on his shoulder and he wanted
to tell every American he could meet that he's not less civilized because
he eats with his fingers.

I was in Eastern Turkey in a land that might be called Kurdistan some day
and met a carver who was famous in his corner of the country, everybody
wanted a prayer niche carved by him. And we visited with him, and he was so
proud to be showing his work off to these American travelers, he lifted his
chisel up to the sky and said, "A man and his chisel, the greatest factory
on earth!" Wow! There's a fulfilled guy. He may not know how to turn on a
computer, but he can define his own success, and I thought that was pretty
cool.

When you travel you just meet people, you meet people all over the
place. A little while ago in Germany a little kid, like a 5-year-old kid,
was just staring at me. And finally his mom said, "Excuse my son, he stares
at Americans. You see, last week we were at MacDonald's and he asked me
'Why do Americans have such soft bread?'" And the mother told the kid,
"Because they have no teeth."

You know, travel puts you in your place.

I'm as inclined as the next American to brag about how well our athletes do
at the Olympics, and I grew up marveling at how great we were, it was
always USA on top of that Olympic medal list. Well, then my Dutch friend
said, "Well, you've got a lot of Olympic medals, but per capita, we're
doing eight times as well as you." We're not used to thinking of Olympic
medals in terms of per capita.

It's important to broaden your perspective and it's important to bring it
home -to bring it home and share it with people that way. We're trying to
bring it home with out kids. Grandma and grandpa came over when my son was
about four years old or three years old and after table prayers I taught
him to say "Allah...Allah...Allah..." Just to freak out my dad. You've got
to put people a little outside their comfort zone to share what you've
learned from your travels.

One thing I've learned from my travels is how Europeans are a little more
progressive than us in dealing with social problems.

Every time there's a death sentence commuted in the United States, there's
a light show at the Coliseum in Rome. They celebrate in Europe when we
commute a death sentence in the United States... And of course when you
travel in Europe you realize that there is a non-criminal approach to
marijuana that could be quite inspirational to American policy makers if
they would just learn about it.

When you think about taking a trip, you can take a trip with your marijuana
or you can take a trip with your passport.

It's kind of fun to take a trip without having to travel.

Just put me in a nice location with a National Geogrpahic and a joint and
I'm climbing Mt. Everest. That travel is really quite cheap if the dollar's
too low... And you can do your actual travel and mix some appreciation of
marijuana into that and it becomes kind of super-travel.

A lot of Americans are not edgy enough to smoke here, where it's illegal,
but it's enjoyable for them to have an opportunity to enjoy some
recreational use of marijuana without the paranoia that comes with doing
that publicly in the United States. First time I ever smoked was in
Afghanistan. As a kid I didn't want peer pressure to make me do something
my parents said I shouldn't. Over there it was just like going local. "When
in Rome," you know; and when in Afghanistan, this is what you do. The bus
stops and everybody stands around and watches a goat get slaughtered and
passes around the bong.

I mean, you stand on the rooftop of your hotel and there's chariots going
by, torchlit, and the lightbulbs are all breathing and people are eating
soup with their hands and they don't drop a bit. And you travel on over to
Nepal and you can look right into the eyes of the living virgin goddess the
Kumari Deva, you've got these slow-motion beach attacks and everybody is
going "namestay, namestay (I salute your virtues)..." and you write in
your journal trying to catch all this stuff and you get home and you hardly
remember where you were high and where you weren't. But when you read it
there's a certain dreaminess that comes into your journal writing that you
can kind of derive, it couldn't have been that great, I must have been high.

When I teach a writer's workshop a lot of times people will ask me "What's
a trick?

How can I be a better travel writer?" One of the tricks of travel writing
is to be able to experiment with your perspective -smoking pot if you want
to sharpen your ability to be a good travel writer.

Like photographers will experiment with light.

Any good photographer's going to play around with existing light, it's a
fascinating thing.

Well, as a travel writer you want to experiment with different perspectives
on things. When you're a keen observer you realize - you can try and kill
flies forever on the bed in Cairo but if you realize that when they're
rubbing their little front feet together, they're toast!

You can get 'em when they're doing this... (rubs his hands)

When you're in Shanghai you see these skyscrapers. They're throwing up the
equivalent of a skyscraper every day in Shanghai, surrounded by a sea of
poverty. When you write about that, it helps to see these skyscrapers as
stilettos just sticking up through this fertile soil of a billion people.
You've got to make your observations from a different angle so people can
better enjoy them.

You're looking into the eyes of Michelangelo's David and you're actually
seeing him sizing up the darkness of medieval superstition right there,
five hundred years ago when Florence was pulling Europe out of the Dark
Ages. For 25 years I've been taking groups around Europe. We take five
thousand people around Europe every year on 200 different tours...

Trying to get my travelers engaged to travel thoughtfully-not just fun in
the sun, not just bingo and not just shopping but thoughtful travel.

Going to Europe is going to a continent where people realize that society
has to make a choice.

You can tolerate alternative lifestyles or you can build more prisons.

But you've got to make a choice.

In Europe they'd rather tolerate alternative lifestyles. In our society
we'd rather build more prisons. We live in a country where the hottest
thing in real estate is gated communities for the wealthy and prisons for
the poor. And we're oblivious. I don't know why we don't see this as a
political issue, but it's a scary thing.

Europeans are quick to remind me that my country has 4% of the world's
population and 25% of its prisoners.

That's not a good statistic.

Europe has learned that you cannot legislate personal morality.

It's futile. It's counterproductive. The Dutch say "We're businessmen. If
there's a problem, we deal with that person as if he's a future customer or
partner. The Dutch have so many creative ways to solve problems.

You can complain about junkmail all you want. In the Netherlands they have
stickers on their mailboxes that say yes or no, so they don't get junkmail
unless they want it. Americans say "We can't have pedestrian streets
because then cars can't get to my shop." In Europe they have pedestrian
streets with little swipe things for a credit card and you swipe it if
you're a resident and the gate goes down but otherwise it's traffic free.
In the Netherlands 40 percent of the traffic is on two wheels.

There are entire communities in Europe that are going to be
wind-powered. There's a race going on right now for that.

They deal with their problems by thinking outside the box. And as Europe
unites, what they're doing gets more impressive. It's easy to write Europe
off as the "old world," but they've got a bigger economy and a bigger
population than we do right now. 400 million people with 11 trillion dollar
GDP and they're not spending half of their disposable income on the
military, they're investing it in their own infrastructure. It's
breathtaking what's going on there.

Our society is making some hard choices right now to cover our government's
military needs -cutting right into people's programs that weaken our
communities. In Europe those are the last things they'd be cutting.

Europe knows how to deal with social problems.

Prostitution? There's no disease, there's no crime with prostitution in
Europe. Prostitutes have their own union.... These days when a prostitute
in the Netherlands has trouble she pushes an emergency button and a pimp
doesn't come, the police come.

When we think about the Netherlands we think about coffeeshops. They've got
loaner bongs. You can check your email.

It's a community center and it's considered by law enforcement officers and
health officials as a good wall between the responsible adult use of soft
drugs and hard drugs.

There's nothing soft about hard drugs [policy] in the Netherlands. They are
anti-hard-drug. They just classify marijuana in the category of alcohol and
tobacco.

The law enforcement officers see it as a wonderful way to communicate with
people who have problems with hard drugs.

They go to the coffeeshops. After 15 years of this, the Netherlands is clear.

Even people who are against drugs are in favor of decriminalizing marijuana.

Teen use does not go up. The crime element around drugs goes way way
down. It's tough that the United States applies pressure on them. I had
people in Copenhagen tell me they had to arrest a couple of potsmokers
every year just to maintain favored trade status with the United States of
America. That's a pathetic thing.

Coming home for me is always a little bit of a jolt. The first person that
meets me at the airport is a dog. I can't help but think: "One nation under
surveillance." We pride ourselves on life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, but we have the shortest vacations in the rich world.

We've got an uptight situation about sex where even my travel shows on PBS
are rated for mature audiences only -if you can imagine that. David's going
to be pixilated here pretty soon. TV programmers around the United States
have a list of how many seconds of marble penis and canvas breast are
showing as I show art from Europe. A lot of programmers can't inflict a
Titian painting or a Michalengelo statue on their viewership in some
conservative communities with taking heat.

In a lot of regards we're going in the wrong direction in this society and
that's why it's good for us all to get together and encourage each other
and break from this huddle [the NORML meeting] and go back into our
communities. Jailing people for pot in Europe would be laughable.

But that's not the case here in the United States. In so many ways I think
we're living a lie.

And that's one reason why I got involved with NORML. I just don't think if
you're a successful, affluent, free country you need to embrace lies to con
your electorate into this or that. We just heard that the intelligence on
weapons of mass destruction was mistaken.

And they all pretend they didn't know... We are routinely outvoted in the
United Nations by 140 to four on environmental issues, development of the
third world, the criminal court, on Cuba, on Israel. Who stands with us?
Israel, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia. That's what I call a rogue
nation.

If there's something going on to help solve the problems of desperately
poor people, there's one country that gets in the way, the U.S.A. It's us!
If Canada wants to give discounted medicine for AIDS to Africa, who gets in
the way of it? We do. If Americans knew this, if it could be communicated
effectively, I think it would be not a very tough sell to get our country a
little more tuned into the needs of the people on this planet.

But we are embracing these lies. We buy this stuff. "No child left behind."
"Clean skies." "I love trees." "The party of life." "Tax relief." "Death
tax." All of this terminology we just embrace. They call it the "defense"
department. Nobody should ever let that word go by without a challenge.
It's not a "defense" department.

We spend as much as the rest of the world put together on the military and
you can't get elected without promising more. There's a mania in that
regard; it's a big problem.

We hear that we're for peace and we've got these 'Christian values,' but
we're pounding plowshares into swords these days at a record pace.
Somebody's got to just stand up and just say -you know, when Bush talks
about freedom and liberty, he's talking about freedom to other people's
natural resources and liberty to use their cheap labor. That's what they're
talking about!

I was down in El Salvador last week. I just wanted to see what was going on
in the developing world.

They've got their struggles between the left and the right down there and
the leftwing party in El Salvador was almost going to win the presidential
election last year and President Bush had to send his brother Jeb down
there to stand by the righwinger and tell the Salvadorans "If you vote for
the leftwing, we're going to stop remittances coming down from all the
refugees working in the United States." Which is a third of the money in El
Salvador's economy.

So most of the people voted for the rightwing, against their interests,
because of this threat from the United States. That's democracy these days.

A leading Jesuit priest, an educator in El Salvador, says whenever he hears
the term "democracy" these days, his bowels move. I've got a journal about
that. If you're curious about what I learned down in El Salvador. It's at
ricksteves.com

One thing I'm concerned about is the mass dumbing down of our society. The
stuff I've been talking about, we go "yeah, yeah, yeah," but the average
person doesn't get it. It's because of fear, I think, and because powerful
forces in our society have been dumbing us down. They would find it
convenient if we all become just mindless producer-consumers. We've got to
not let them dumb us down. Because when we're dumbed down, that's the only
way political initiatives against the interest of the people in general can
have a chance.

The news is not news. Reality tv is not reality.

When you see steroids on TV, and Michael Jackson and Terry Schiavo and so
on, nobody's talking about the big issues.

I mean every day, if you care about people if you're into sanctity of life,
every day three times as many people who died on 9/11 die in Africa. Every
day because of AIDs. That's a real problem that can be dealt with. We hear
about the tsunami, and then it's gone out of the news. And nobody tells us
that every week there's a tsunami worth of innocent children that die of
starvation on this planet.

It's just structural poverty, and America is the flagbearer of this
structural poverty around the planet.

As good people we can encourage our neighbors and so on to become a little
more progressive.

The problem with marijuana is, if they're trying to make us just mindless
producer-consumers, marijuana is not good on either account.

It doesn't make us want to produce more and the only thing we would consume
more is cheetos. The thing this society doesn't like about marijuana is it
turns people who wouldn't otherwise be poets into poets.

Think of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs.

First you get your clothes and your car and your house and then you can do
things that are more creative and then at the top you got "selfless
actualization," helping other people.

It's more convenient in our society to have barbed wire strung around
Maslow's hierarchy about midway, so that we continue to consume on the
bottom end, ut and out and out, not realizing that we can step over the
barbed wire and live more fulfilling lives.

One of the reasons why philosophically I'm into marijuana is that it's a
good way to cut that barbed wire and be true to yourself and be what really
is successful.

To sell this propaganda of our government's war on drugs requires using the
big-lie technique.

Hitler learned that you can tell a big lie over and over again, and people
believe it if you tell it enough times.

We've got to recognize the propaganda. The propaganda erodes the
credibility of the government, of schools, of families when it comes to
marijuana.

We've got a government -a White House-that spends millions of dollars
advertising in the Super Bowl trying to tell people that marijuana causes
teen pregnancies. And it's surrounded by beer ads! Now what's causing the
pregnancies?

I've got friends who are teachers and the DARE program by any teacher's
assessment is somewhere between ineffectual and counterproductive. When you
get a DARE officer in the teachers lounge, teachers who are free spirits,
Dead Poets Society type, are cowed into silence.

You can hear a pin drop in the teacher's lounge when the DARE officer is there.

No one will question DARE because it's bad news for your job security if
you are known as somebody who is a little bit open-minded about creative
ways to deal with drugs and children. It is so exciting to go to a DARE
meeting at school and question it. I mean, many parents there want to do it
but they're just too chicken.

Many parents know this is bogus but they just are afraid and this fear is
what's keeping us down.

At home, I have two teenage kids. My wife is a nervous wreck.

Parents are taught that this is a gateway drug and it's 20 times as
powerful back when we did it innocently when we were kids and all this
kinds of stuff.

I'm excited about having credibility with my kids. One of the perks I get
for being on the advisory board here at NORML is I can invite Keith Stroup
over for dinner and introduce my teenage kids to a lawyer who has dedicated
his life to an ideal rather than people with a lot of money.

There's a nobility in our struggle that I think can be explained a little
better. My daughter just wrote a paper.

She got to choose whatever topic she wanted and she chose "Why marijuana
should be decriminalized. I just read the teacher's response to it two days
ago. She got an 'A' but the teacher said, "We don't all have to agree with
you, but it's a good paper."

I think the underlying thing about this propaganda war on the part of our
government against marijuana is that even more than stopping kids from drug
use, what's motivating them is instilling fear in parents.

Because fear is the only way they're going to keep us down. Normally, I'm
not talking about the decriminalization of marijuana, I'm talking about
foreign policy and 9/11 stuff and terrorism.

That relates to my travel stuff more directly. But it is the same thing!

Our government wants us to be afraid and the fear enables them to
manipulate us this way.

For goodness sakes, we've got doctors and scientists and medical experts
that have to be politically correct to give our government advice. It's
sort of bad news to make Hitler parallels but it's getting more and more
like that. Our environmental policies, our health policies, our AIDS
policies, are shaped by people who are driven by ideological agendas.

I mean, tears cause AIDS now... Our government is embracing this. It's
amazing to me. I was very impressed when I read on the NORML website a
bulletin the Drug Czar sent out to all the prosecuting attorneys listing 20
reasons why marijuana is the devil's weed. Each one of these points is
refuted very solidly on the NORML website.

But that our government would be giving this trash to prosecutors with the
implication that you better be running with this sort of standard....That's
just really -somebody's got to stand up to that.

Travel teaches you a respect for history.

We should learn from history.

We had this 13-year experiment with Prohibition and I think by any sober
assessment, it just made a lot of criminals, filled a lot of prisons and
cost our society a lot of money back in the '20s. It was big government at
its worst.

Today, more and more people are waking up to this prohibition that's
keeping Americans who shouldn't be criminals criminals.

It's causing so many people to be arrested every year. If one person is
arrested for marijuana is contributing to the congestion of our prisons
right now, that's one person too many.

.We need to balance our activism.

I think your marijuana activism will be more effective if your also into
the PTA and homelessness and the schools and public television or whatever.

It makes me be more credible because people know I'm into other causes,
also. It makes me feel more effective as an advocate of decriminalizing
marijuana.

We have a clear message and you've just got to have these figures. 750,000
Americans were arrested last year because of marijuana, 88% of them for
simple possession. Our country blew 7 billion dollars on this. This should
be a conservative issue.

We can talk about the European solution.

Fifteen years they've been experimenting with treating marijuana as a
medical concern rather than a criminal one. Even crusty, conservative law
enforcement types like it this way. We need to pre-empt the discredit.
They're going to say: You're for children abusing drugs?

No, we're not for children smoking pot, we're not for hard drugs, we're not
for driving when you're high, none of that stuff.

But you need to pre-empt that because they'll try to discredit you right
away... Responsible adult use is okay, but nobody's talking about kids
getting easy access to pot. We need to shoot off that torpedo before they
torpedo us with it.

People think advocating for NORML is advocating for breaking a law. It's
not. It's advocating to change a law -and that's a very fundamental
difference. I'm not saying to smoke pot. I'[m saying it's wrong to arrest
people who want to smoke pot as mature adults, or for medical use. We're
not saying break the law. I want to support NORML publicly like I support
travel. I think it's a matter of freedom.

I think it's recess, and we need it in this society.

Being high to me is a little like Cuba. Any time my government says I can't
go somewhere, I feel it's one of my rights to go there. My government
can't tell me I can't go to Cuba. Everyone else is going to Cuba, why can't
I go to Cuba?

And I don't think my government can tell me what I can do as a responsible
citizen in the privacy of my own home. We need to challenge our friends.
It's frustrating to me that there are so many potsmokers out there who
don't even put two and two together.

To me, NORML is not a charity, NORML is a service.

So, happy travels, even if you're just staying home. Thank you very much.