DE-FANG MARIJUANA

So thoroughgoing is the unofficial ban on debate of the nation's drug laws
that American politicians prefer smoking pot to talking about it.

They typically try marijuana as teen-agers or young adults, suffer no
consequences, then go on to maintain as elected officials that anyone with
the temerity to do what they did should be arrested and maybe even jailed.

Once and probably future presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance,
spent much of his post-adolescence smoking dope and skipping through fields
of clover, according to biographer Bill Turque.

He somehow still managed to become one of the most notoriously uptight and
ambitious politicians in the country. But Gore, like nearly everyone else,
thinks smoking pot should be a criminal offense.

Not everywhere in the world is there such conformity on drug issues. Much
of Europe is reconsidering its drug laws - in Britain, the Labor Party
recently proposed downgrading the possession of marijuana to a
wrist-slapping offense. Meanwhile, in the United States "the war on drugs"
grinds pointlessly on.

At least there is some fresh air in the media. John Stossel took an ax to
drug-war cliches in a special report on ABC this week.

Drug Enforcement Agency Director Asa Hutchinson had to insist wanly on air
that, despite all the billions of dollars spent and countless thousands
arrested, the war just hadn't yet been fought hard enough.

He sounded like one of those diehards who argued during the Cold War that
socialism hadn't failed, it just had never been truly tried.

When it comes to marijuana, it's unclear why anyone would try to stamp out
its use in the first place.

Alcohol and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. In
contrast, there is no such thing as a lethal overdose of marijuana.

Yet federal law makes possessing a single joint punishable by up to a year
in prison, and many states have similar penalties. There are about 700,000
marijuana arrests in the United States every year, roughly 80 percent for
possession.

For the vast majority of its users, marijuana is nearly harmless and
represents a temporary enthusiasm.

Most marijuana users are between the ages of 18 and 25, and use plummets
after age 34, by which time children and mortgages blunt the appeal of
rolling papers and bongs.

Since drug warriors have a hard time arguing that marijuana itself is
dangerous, they instead rely on a bank shot: Marijuana's danger is that it
leads to the use of drugs that are actually dangerous - it is a so-called
"gateway drug."

Not so. According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, "Of 34- to
35-year-old men who had used marijuana 10-99 times by the age 24 to 25, 75
percent never used any other illicit drug."

And users simply don't get addicted to marijuana the way they do harder
drugs. One key indicator of the addictiveness of other drugs is that lab
rats will self-administer them. Rats won't self-administer THC, the active
ingredient in marijuana.

Two researchers in 1991 studied the addictiveness of caffeine, nicotine,
alcohol, heroin, cocaine and marijuana. Both ranked caffeine and marijuana
as the least addictive.

Despite the heated rhetoric of the drug war, on marijuana there is a de
facto consensus: Legalizers think marijuana laws shouldn't be on the books;
prohibitionists think, in effect, that they shouldn't be enforced.

A compromise would be a version of the Dutch model of decriminalization,
removing criminal penalties for personal use of marijuana, but keeping the
prohibition on street-trafficking and mass cultivation.

That, of course, would require that politicians apply some of the energy
they once devoted to enjoying marijuana to discussing forthrightly its
legal status. But they prefer to smoke, then keep forever mum.