THE RETURN OF REEFER MADNESS

I had to laugh the other night as my wife and I walked our dog. We
were strolling through our nearly all-white upper-middle-class suburb
singing, "No, no, no, no I don't smoke it no more/I'm tired of waking
up on the floor," from the "No No Song" by Ringo Starr, when what to
our wondering eyes did appear but a neighbor sporting a joint in his
pickup truck.

Spying us, he finished his drag and quickly slid the roach into his
truck's ashtray.

It did not take "Dragnet's" Joe Friday to crack this case. Any
American who came of age during the last 30 or 40 years knows the
telltale signs, especially the slow exhalation and the croaky "hello"
he gave us, followed by the smell of smoke, but not quite of the
Marlboro variety.

What was particularly amusing to me was that this incident occurred a
day or two after I read an article stating that the federal government
was planning to shift some of its anti-drug funds away from cocaine
and heroin to marijuana. According to the report, over the years pot
has become far more potent than what was available 20 or 30 years ago.
The government is now back to claiming that grass is as addictive as
hard drugs.

The problem with this is threefold: Federal and state officials lost
all credibility about marijuana when millions of kids smoked pot in
college and did not suffer the ill effects depicted in such
monumentally absurd pieces of propaganda as the 1938 flick "Reefer
Madness." That particular attempt at stemming the tide of drug abuse
was, in fact, great entertainment at midnight shows in college where
most of the audience was high and goofing on the film.

The second disconnect is that although marijuana has been lumped in
the great pantheon of illegal drugs, its effects are decidedly
different from such substances as PCP, crack cocaine and
methamphetamines, which have all been shown to produce uncontrollable
violence in people. I have yet to hear of someone who smoked pot and
then ax-murdered his family.

The third problem the government faces is that nobody gives a darn
what it has to say on the issue of marijuana. The neighborhood pot
smoker we encountered is a 50ish, married father who owns his own
business and appears to be living the American dream. He knows, as do
I and our contemporaries, that nothing bad is really going to happen
to him physically or criminally for the casual consumption of a joint.

The night after I saw my pothead neighbor, a couple of buddies and I
discussed the issue. We decided that marijuana should be regulated so
that folks know the strength of the dope they're smoking. We even came
up with an easy way of rating the stuff. Rather than apply the
confusing color-coding system used in terrorism alerts, feds should
use a ranking system we are all familiar with - like gasoline. Pot
could be classified as 87, 89 or 92 octane. On the low end would be 87
for people wanting to relax a little or as a precursor to a romantic
liaison. An 89 would be for those who suffer insomnia or migraines.
The most powerful dosage, 92, would be reserved for people suffering
from painful liver cancer and the like.

The eggheads in Washington would be wise to realize that a lot of
honest, hard-working people in America like to get high. If it's true
that this new stuff is really a danger, the government should provide
consumers with truth in packaging and focus their efforts instead on
the drugs that result in ax murders.