Commentary

POT EVOKES PARANOIA, HYPOCRISY

When l7 political parties make it on the state ballot, we'll have ballot
reform, swiftly, because that's when one of the major parties will have to
start sharing space.

Until then, people like William Bombard, the local Libertarian Party
candidate for state Assembly, will have to put up with sharing their ballot
line. On Tuesday, the Libertarians are sharing with the Marijuana Reform Party.

Mr. Bombard is unhappy about this. He thinks the ballot layout makes it
look like he's representing the Marijuana Reform Party. It does look that
way and, as Mr. Bombard hastened to tell The Post-Star recently, he doesn't
think pot should be legal.

So Mr. Bombard is right. It's confusing and unfair to make minor party
candidates share ballot space.

But when it comes to marijuana, Mr. Bombard is wrong.

Marijuana should be legal for medical use. And we should stop filling our
prisons with people who have done nothing more than use a drug less potent
than alcohol.

We're a nation of hypocrites when it comes to drugs, tolerant of filling
ourselves and our children full of mood-altering substances like Valium and
Ritalin but paranoid about marijuana.

Mr. Bombard is upset, not because he has to share his box on the ballot,
but because he has to share it with the word "marijuana."

Thomas Golisano thinks marijuana should be legal for medical purposes. So
does Carl McCall. So do the thousands of people with terminal illnesses who
have testified that marijuana -- more than any other drug they've tried --
helps relieve their pain and ease their nausea.

But all across the country, powerful politicians who have received tens of
thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from drug companies have
kept marijuana illegal. George Pataki is one of those politicians.

Mr. Pataki has admitted being so fond of pot when he was a young adult that
he used to cook it up with baked beans. Nevertheless, he wants New York to
keep imprisoning people on pot charges, and he wants to keep marijuana away
from the terminally ill.

He and other politicians like him have forced very sick people, and members
of their families, to commit crimes to relieve their symptoms.

Imagine your husband or your wife had cancer and it turned out that smoking
pot worked better than anything else to ease their pain. Would you cook
them up a baked bean Pataki special? Or would you obey the law and let them
suffer?

That's a much harder choice than anyone is going to have to make on
Election Day. That's a choice we should not be forcing anyone to make, on
any day.