DRUG CZAR BATTLES HORDES OF CRAZED POTHEADS!

He'll huff, and he'll puff, and he'll blow your house down. He'll act out
violently, get your next door neighbor's daughter pregnant, and he may even
be supporting terrorism while he's at it.

This imaginary pot smoker composite is drug czar John Walters's big bad
wolf, and only a duct-taped cottage window seems to stand in the path of
the cannabis-fueled monster that lurks around the corner.

That, and $150 million earmarked in the current fiscal year to further a
propagandistic anti-marijuana campaign, courtesy of Walters's Office of
National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). Full-page advertisements from the
ONDCP in national newspapers and magazines (including The Nation) are just
the latest gambit aimed at generating a heightened sense of parental
anxiety and moral panic, suggesting that aggressive or violent behavior -
and even psychoses - are among the consequences awaiting young people who
try marijuana.

Health consequences for teens who smoke marijuana are, of course, something
kids and their parents should talk about openly, but with real facts at
hand. Compared to much more common binge drinking - to say nothing of
consequent car accidents, and sexual and physical abuse - pot smoking
should, logically, rank much lower on the list of parental concerns.

Not so, says the drug czar. Parents need to know that they are the
"anti-drug" and millions are being spent telling them there's no drug more
dangerous to the nation's teenagers than marijuana. And if the parent
"fails" to protect society from a pot-smoking teen, then law enforcement is
eager to step in, to the tune of nearly 126,000 juvenile arrests for
marijuana offenses in 2000 alone. "We have policy on marijuana being made
by fanatics and ideologues," says Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy
Project in Washington, DC. "I think the current campaign is seen as a safe
way to fire up their socially conservative base and to squash the movement
to rethink our marijuana laws and drug laws in general," adds Mirken. "It's
certainly not any sort of a rational attempt to prevent harm to our young
people."

For his part, Walters has been busy crisscrossing the nation, trying to
extinguish even the slightest moves to alter the nation's draconian drug
laws. In Nevada last year, Walters spent months campaigning to help defeat
Question 9, which would have legalized and regulated marijuana there. When
Nevada's Secretary of State demanded disclosure of the monies spent
campaigning against a state initiative - as required by Nevada law -
Walters and the ONDCP shrugged it off and simply refused to disclose. More
recently, Walters and a small cadre of aides paid a well-timed visit to
Santa Fe, New Mexico, just days before a medical marijuana initiative was
introduced in the state legislature. The drug czar talked about the dangers
of marijuana and handed out packets featuring pictures of smiling,
drug-free Native American children.

And in Maryland in late March, Walters campaigned in full force, trying to
prevent passage of that state's conservatively worded medical marijuana
bill. The arguments for medical marijuana, Walters announced, make no more
sense than "an argument for medical crack."

It's reefer madness, all over again. In the 1930s, Federal Bureau of
Narcotics head Harry Anslinger oversaw a well-timed, post-alcohol
prohibition crusade to criminalize and demonize the use of marijuana.
Movies of the era, including the cult-classic Reefer Madness, depicted the
"demon weed" changing the personalities of high school kids, who after
partaking went insane, immersed themselves in "evil" jazz music and then
went on murder sprees. Sometimes it seems that Walters is no more
sophisticated than his crude 1930s-era counterpart, explains University of
Southern California psychology professor Mitch Earleywine.

Professor Earleywine, who wrote last year's "Understanding Marijuana: A New
Look at the Scientific Evidence," notes that Walters is resorting to
emotionally provocative and hysterical imagery - including televised images
of a teen being molested and another girl ending up with an unwanted
pregnancy because they smoked weed. Another commercial shows a boy
accidentally shooting his friend after getting high. "[That's] the best
argument for gun control I've seen in years," says Earleywine. "But lies
like these cost us credibility [with teens]. Even true statements about
dangerous drugs like cocaine and heroin become suspect."

And there's absolutely no evidence that the ONDCP campaign, which included
the creation of websites such as TheAntiDrug.com, Freevibe.com,
TeachersGuide.org and DrugStory.org (for entertainment and health
journalists, no less), is working. An independent group hired by the
government to evaluate the campaign last year found that there had been "no
statistically significant decline in marijuana use, to date, and some
evidence of an increase in use from 2000 to 2001...Also there's no tendency
for those reporting more exposure to Campaign messages to hold more
desirable beliefs."

Perhaps in response to this study, the ONDCP announced on April 1 that it
was ending its "drugs=terrorism" campaign in favor of other approaches. At
the same time, the drug czar's office also mentioned that it was putting a
stop to the aforementioned annual study.

The persistence of grossly exaggerated antidrug propaganda has been a
uniquely American approach since Anslinger's time. Only today, the stakes
are higher, with the drug-war budget at record levels: Nearly $20 billion
for the current fiscal year, according to analysis from Common Sense for
Drug Policy. The lifelong societal consequences for a drug arrest are ever
more severe in the form of denied student aid, public housing and welfare
to those with felony drug records. As millions of ex-offenders have found
out, decent, well-paying jobs are nearly impossible to come by once a drug
charge has found its way onto a criminal record.

In 2001, on average, marijuana offenders served more than three years in
federal prison. But much longer prison terms - even life sentences - for
marijuana-related offenses are being meted out, disrupting and sometimes
destroying the lives of mostly ordinary, otherwise law-abiding Americans.
Altogether, nearly 734,000 people were arrested in the United States for a
marijuana-related offense in 2000, the most recent year for which such
figures are available. Of those arrests, according to the FBI's division of
Uniform Crime Reports, 88 percent were for possession.

In perhaps the most devastating example of a drug-war policy gone awry, a
married couple, Dennis and Denise Schilling, chose to end their lives
rather than face a house forfeiture and time in prison. They had been
arrested for selling $120 worth of marijuana to an undercover police
office, who subsequently raided their house and arrested the couple in
Wisconsin last fall. After his parents hung themselves in a motel, son
Joshua Schilling was spared prison for his part in the small-scale sale but
sentenced to thousands of dollars in fines, three years' probation and
other assorted forms of punishment. "Perhaps someday, people like me will
not be so persecuted," Denise Schilling wrote in her suicide note. Perhaps
someday, indeed.

Silja J.A. Talvi writes on prison and criminal justice issues for In These
Times, the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation and other publications.
Her work appears in the newly released anthology, "Prison Nation"
(Routledge, 2003).