REEFER MADNESS

We interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that
other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs. To
judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of
routing the Taliban - helping to halt a relentless jihad against the
nation's drug laws.

Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent
drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the
equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and
Nevada (full legalization of marijuana) lost decisively this month.
Liberalization measures in Florida and Michigan never even made it to the
ballot.

Some of this was due to the Republican election tide. Some was generational
- - boomer parents like me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become
drug-addled slackers. (John Walters, the White House drug czar, shrewdly
played on this anxiety by hyping the higher potency of today's pot with the
line, "This is not your father's marijuana.") Some may have been a
reluctance to loosen any social safety belts when the nation is under
threat. Certainly a major factor was that proponents of change, who had
been winning carefully poll-tested ballot measures, state by state, since
California in 1996, found themselves facing a serious and well-financed
opposition, cheered on by Walters.

The truly amazing thing is that 30 years into the modern war on drugs, the
discourse is still focused disproportionately on marijuana rather than more
important and excruciatingly hard problems like heroin, cocaine and
methamphetamines.

The drug liberalizers - an alliance of legal reformers, liberals,
libertarians and potheads - dwell on marijuana in part because a lot of the
energy and money in their campaign comes from people who like to smoke pot
and want the government off their backs. Also, marijuana has provided them
with their most marketable wedge issue, the use of pot to relieve the
suffering of AIDS and cancer patients. Never mind that the medical benefits
of smoking marijuana are still mostly unproven (in part because the FDA
almost never approves the research and the pharmaceuticals industry sees no
money in it). The issue may be peripheral, but it appeals to our
compassion, especially when the administration plays the heartless heavy by
sending SWAT teams to arrest people in wheelchairs. Thus a movement that
started, at least in the minds of reform sponsors like the billionaire
George Soros, as an effort to reduce the ravages of both drugs and the war
on drugs, has become mostly about pot smoking.

The more interesting question is why the White House is so obsessed with
marijuana. The memorable achievements of Walters' brief tenure have been
things like cutting off student loans for kids with pot convictions,
threatening doctors who recommend pot to cancer patients and introducing TV
commercials that have the tone and credibility of wartime propaganda. One
commercial tells pot smokers that they are subsidizing terrorists. Another
shows a stoned teenager discovering a handgun in Dad's desk drawer and
dreamily shooting a friend. (You'll find it at www.mediacampaign.org. Watch
it with the sound off, and you'd swear it was an ad for gun control.)

Drug czars used to draw a distinction between casual-use drugs like
marijuana and the hard drugs whose craving breeds crime and community
desolation. But this is not your father's drug czar. Walters insists
marijuana is inseparable from heroin or cocaine. He offers two arguments,
both of which sound as if they come from the same people who manufacture
the Bush administration's flimsy economic logic.

One is that marijuana
is a "gateway" to hard-drug use. Actually Walters, who is a political
scientist but likes to sound like an epidemiologist, prefers to say that
pot use is an "increased risk factor" for other drugs. The point in our
conversation when my nonsense-alarm went off was when he likened the
relationship between pot and hard drugs to that between cholesterol and
heart disease. In fact, the claim that marijuana leads to the use of other
drugs appears to be unfounded. On the contrary, an interesting new study by
Andrew Morral of RAND, out in the December issue of the British journal
Addiction, shows that the correlation between pot and hard drugs can be
fully explained by the fact that some people, by virtue of genetics or
circumstances, have a predisposition to use drugs.

Walters' other justification for turning his office into the War on Pot is
the dramatic increase in the number of marijuana smokers seeking
professional help. This, he claims, reflects an alarming rise in the number
of people hooked on cannabis. But common sense and the government's own
statistics suggest an alternative explanation: If you're caught with pot,
enrolling in a treatment program is the price of avoiding jail. And
marijuana arrests have doubled in less than a decade, to 700,000 a year,
even as use of the drug has remained static. In other words, the stampede
of pot smokers into treatment is probably not a sign of more dependency,
but of more aggressive enforcement.

So what's really going on at the White House drug office? I can think of
three answers. One is that they are sincerely worried about pot. Marijuana
is not harmless. Regular pot smoking can mess with your memory and
attention span, your immune system and fertility. Walters may feel the
dangers justify a lot of hyperbole.

A second explanation is the old political-bureaucratic imperative. To
justify a $19 billion drug control program you need a threat that touches
middle-class voters - not just the few million mostly wretched, mostly
inner-city, mostly nonvoting users of heroin and cocaine. And you want to
be able to claim success. When he appointed Walters, President Bush
announced he wanted "measurable results," and the measure would be a
reduction in the number of people who admit to being recent drug users - 10
percent by 2004. Well, since three-fourths of illicit drug users are pot
smokers, the easy way to get the numbers down is to attack the least
important aspect of the drug problem. That will give President Bush some
bogus victories to boast about when he runs for re-election.

The third reason is the culture war. Walters is a veteran of the
conservative political bunkers, where pot is viewed as a manifestation of
moral degeneracy. "It's still about the war in Vietnam and growing your
hair long," says Mark Kleiman, a drug law expert at UCLA and a thoughtful
centrist in a debate monopolized by extremes. "It's the '60s being replayed
again and again and again - the SDS versus the football team." For this
White House, to give ground on pot would be a moral surrender.

Kleiman's view, which I find persuasive, is that the way to deal with
marijuana is to remove criminal penalties for possession, use (recreational
or medicinal) and cultivation of small amounts, but not to legalize its
sale. It's silly and costly to treat people as outlaws for enjoying a drug
that is roughly as addictive as caffeine and far less destructive than
tobacco or alcohol. At the same time, the inexorable logic of a legal
marketplace would mean a lot more consumption and abuse. Consider this
statistic: Fifty percent of the liquor industry's revenues are derived from
alcoholics - people who down at least four drinks every day. The sin
business, whether it's a private liquor company or a state-run lottery, may
preach responsible behavior, but it thrives on addiction.

Once you're past pot, you face the gloomy landscape of hard drugs, along
with newer chemical worries like Ecstasy. If your experience of the
hard-core drug world is mostly from movies like "Traffic" or two splendid
HBO series, "The Corner" and "The Wire," you may be inclined to despair of
easy answers. You would not be wrong. The moralistic drug war has
overstuffed our prisons, left communities fatherless, fed corruption,
consumed vast quantities of law enforcement time and money, and led us into
some cynical foreign ventures, all without making drugs scarcer or more
expensive. Legalization, on the other hand, means less crime and inner-city
misery, but more addicts.

The things worth doing are incremental and unglamorous and lacking in
demagogic appeal. They aim not at winning a spurious war but at minimizing
harm - both the harm caused by drugs, and the harm caused by draconian
enforcement. Almost everyone (including Walters, in principle) agrees that
diverting drug users into treatment, preferably backed by the threat of
jail, is much better than consigning them to prison. But liberalizers are
all carrot, and drug warriors are all stick. The drug czar who so eagerly
intervened in Arizona and Nevada has kept his distance from efforts to
humanize New York's merciless and failed Rockefeller drug laws.

Drug reform requires not only money, creativity and patience, but also the
political courage to face down ideologues. And political courage, you may
have noticed, is a lot harder to come by than drugs.

Bill Keller is an opinion columnist and senior writer for The New York
Times Magazine.