GEORGE BUSH'S JOINT

Rebecca Schoenkopf Takes On The President's Drug War

Marijuana can be addictive. Marijuana isn't great for learning or
short-term memory. Marijuana's not the best thing for children-the best
things for children are fresh air, sunshine and love! And if you own a bong
(or "water pipe," as the head shops insist upon calling them), the chances
are good that you smoke way too much dope. Nobody really needs a bong.

Can we all stipulate to that?

The White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy wants us to
stipulate to a little more: that marijuana is far more dangerous than it
was when the Boomers smoked it (the Boomers, of course, can't refute this
by admitting to smoking it still); that marijuana will turn our precious
tots into dropouts who rob banks; that marijuana is, in fact, a scourge
upon our youth. To do this, they threw a party. Okay, it wasn't so much a
party as a panel put on for the SoCal media, but I love panels, and the
sandwiches were excellent.

Tuesday afternoon, I got an invite for the "Marijuana & Kids" media
briefing in San Diego the next day. Fantastic. A few minutes later, my dad
called to check in and have a nice gossip. My dad is a recovering addict
(mostly coke and other uppers) who owns and runs a treatment center in
Malibu and also publishes the online magazine Heroin Times. It's a
nonjudgmental look at all the facets of heroin addiction, providing
information on how to kick it, obits from grieving parents, editorials on
the Drug War and referrals on where to get clean.

Would my dad come with me to San Diego? We could board the Amtrak right in
Santa Ana and have a delightful day together under the auspices of the
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. It would be the best
day ever!

My dad said yes!

The whole way down to San Diego, we drank coffee in the Coastliner's lounge
car and watched the folks on their way to the Del Mar racetrack troop
boisterously in for more rounds of beers and bloody Marys. It was 10:30
a.m. A young blond guy several beers in sat with headphones on and stared
at me. We avoided his reddened gaze and chatted instead with a man who had
overheard us guffawing about the conference to which we were headed.

I'm not a NORML member, but I think prohibitions against pot are
preposterous. I find especially outrageous the $170 million budget of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy-and that's just for ad campaigns and
media buys. It doesn't count the billions spent on black helicopters and
agent orange for spraying on farms in South America. I even thought Johnny
Depp's recent quote about buying pot for his kids when they get older was
the most responsible bit of parenting I'd heard in some time.

I grew up with a daddy who was a drug addict, and I have a pretty good
grasp on "harmful." Harmful and I go way back. And the occasional
pot-smoker ain't it.

Take two drinks at dinner? Get giggly at a party? You're probably okay. Get
smashed on rye and drive with your kid in the car? You're probably not. And
it viscerally pisses me off when people try to conflate the two. The Office
of National Drug Control Policy wants us to know it's a "myth" that
marijuana is "harmless." Thanks for the straw man, Office of National Drug
Control Policy. Nobody said it was, but for the vast majority of otherwise
law-abiding citizens who smoke dope once in a while, it's fine. In fact, we
even have a young family member who is addicted to pot; we've had loads of
fabulous interventions for him that didn't take, but now that he's a little
bit older, he seems to be letting go of all his drop-out, no-job lameness
all by himself. Right now he's in school and has a part-time job, and we're
very encouraged. Addiction to pot is bad, but even so, he has yet to
violently rob a bank. The only person he's hurting is his long-suffering
mother, who has to scrimp to pay his rent. Being lazy isn't against the
law-yet.

So don't get addicted; keep it to the equivalent of a drink at dinner, and
it'll probably lower your blood pressure and cure your glaucoma. I'd like
to see the "liberal" mainstream media admit that just once.

Going to the media briefing on "Marijuana & Kids" from the Office of
National Drug Control Policy, I had, you could say, an agenda.

The guy on the train lives in a Laguna Beach halfway house and was on his
way to Tijuana to gamble. His sponsors say he has given up one addiction
for another, but he never bets more than he can afford to lose. He never
bets his rent. You know what I say? That that's probably fine.

With the ocean to the west, my dad fielded phone calls from his staff about
this or that client melting down into pockmarked piles of sobbing flesh
(and one who was having a herpes outbreak and needed an Acyclovir
scrip-stat!). Drugs are bad, and herpes is, too, but not one of his clients
is in there for marijuana dependency; they're in for really icky stuff,
like junk and crack. Stuff that will kill you or cause you to leave your
baby in the crib for three days while you go on a mission, unlike pot. An
hour later, the Office of National Drug Control Policy would try to tell us
otherwise. Its panel of San Diego experts repeatedly conflated numbers of
people court-ordered into rehab with numbers of people addicted to
marijuana, for instance, even though if you're caught with pot, you're
ordered into rehab regardless of whether or not you're an addict. Rex
Hudler, we hardly knew ye.

Yes, the Office of National Drug Control Policy had lots of statistics. The
only problem was their stats kept contradicting their other stats, but they
kept repeating them just the same. It was kind of like a prosecutor who
tries two supposed accomplices separately, changing the facts in each trial
so he can argue that this was the perp who had pulled the trigger.
Perfectly legal according to the appellate courts, but kind of stinky,
don't you think?

We walked from the lovely train depot through a Caltrans war zone on
Pacific Highway to the San Diego County Administration Building; engraved
on the front of the grand, tall building was the legend "Good Government
Demands the Intelligent Interest of Every Citizen." We had to enter from
the side; the front doors are closed so terrorists can't come in. Works
from a civic art exhibition lined the walls of the first floor-citizens'
sweet watercolors of frogs and Mission architecture. On the third floor,
two female aides were waiting to greet us and point us into the right room.
They knew who we were because we had RSVP'd, but there was still a moment
of paranoia on my part. I really wish I knew what was in my FBI file.

We sat in the second row of a conference room that was perhaps 7 percent
full. A few local news stations sent cameras; they wouldn't have much to
film, but we all got swell press packs, helpfully complemented with
notepads and pens. Those of us who were real journalists already had our
own long notebooks, and we wielded them proudly. There seemed to be three
of us. (The other nine or 10 attendees, it would turn out, were
representing for marijuana task forces and local treatment centers. The
task forcers would go on to spout really wild-eyed statements during the
question segment. Fun!) We looked through press packets brimming with stat
sheets and releases. On the very first page, the fourth bullet point
stated, "In [fiscal year] 2001, 42.2 percent of federally sentenced
offenders in Southern California had committed a drug offense. Of that
total, 76.8 percent involved marijuana."

He's Mr. Reasonable, in fact. Boy howdy, is Bob Denniston reasonable! He is
not shrill at all, and we had a lovely chat about Cuba, among other things.

But when I called the next day to follow up on House Resolution 2086, the
re-authorization of the Office on National Drug Control Policy, which
includes the language, "take all steps necessary to oppose any attempt to
legalize the use of a substance" (so tax dollars, for instance could be
spent on partisan campaigns against a pro-legalization candidate), and to
follow up on Denniston's role, if any, in the Super Bowl "terror"
commercials and to ask some budget questions, why, my new pal Bob didn't
call me back.

Nor the next day.

In fact, of all the panelists I called for follow-up (their numbers were
very thoughtfully included in the press packets), only Igor ever answered
his phone.

I've got eight pages, though, helpfully informing me of the relationship
between marijuana use and delinquent behaviors.