GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGN NEEDED

So we have this cool new mayor, right? Well, you should have heard all the
nickel-bag grief he was getting yesterday.

It wasn't just the marijuana activists, slapping his grinning face on a
pro-legalization ad campaign. That's fair-game guerrilla politics, clever
and cheap.

But here, in the big marble lobby of City Hall, was a bunch of goofy-looking
people -- reporters, City Council aides, even a couple of folks on the
Bloomberg administration payroll, current and former potheads among them,
I'm sure -- tossing off the stoner puns like so many dying roaches at the
end of a very long night.

"Mayor Pol Pot," someone offered.

"You know those famous fish tanks of his? Industrial-size bongs."

"I have it," someone else announced. "Maybe we should change the name of the
city back to New Amsterdam," a tribute to the hash-filled "coffee shops" and
relaxed marijuana laws of our old Dutch namesake.

Ah, New York!

Or as some of these exhaling citizens were no doubt saying yesterday, after
news of the mayor's giddy past had wafted across the boroughs:
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, New York!

Were these people stoned? Had they spent too much time on tour with Snoop
Dogg? How else to explain the kilos of lame druggie jokes?

All because, during last year's mayoral race, Michael Bloomberg was asked
the marijuana question, and he decided to answer it straight.

"Have you ever" -- blah, blah, blah, blah?

"You bet I did," Bloomberg told the reporter from New York magazine. "And I
enjoyed it."

Mike Bloomberg might be a politician now. But he hasn't lost all his
frankness yet. He was asked a question. He answered it. And he didn't weasel
the way most politicians still do.

He didn't swear he never inhaled, like Bill Clinton did.

He didn't pretend it was only "once or twice" and that he had spent the rest
of his life regretting those tiny, little tokes. That's Al Gore's line.

He didn't come up with a convoluted story like George Pataki. Pataki says
that a law-school pal cooked the marijuana into a pot of baked beans --
baked beans! -- and only later did innocent George get around to smoking the
conventional way. And of course it "had no real appeal" for him, so he
stopped immediately.

It's hard to know which of these stories is most preposterous. But could
anyone doubt Bloomberg? That's what people like about this guy. He speaks
with a shrug and comes off real.

Leave it to the George W. Bushes of the world to bob and weave around the
drug-use questions. "I was young and irresponsible" -- wink-wink,
nudge-nudge. Bloomberg answers the way that normal people do: Yeah -- and so
what?

At this point, I think there are only two people left in public life who
haven't more or less admitted to smoking marijuana. They are Rudy Giuliani
and John Ashcroft, and that should tell you something right there.

One of them spent his formative years in the Reagan Justice Department. The
other, now the U.S. attorney general, spent the 60s attending Pentecostal
prayer meetings and speaking in tongues.

I say give us old pot smokers any day.

Now let's see if we can deliver Mike Bloomberg from the personal to the
political. How can we channel that lovely candor of his into a city pot
policy that makes some actual sense?

What's good enough for Bloomberg -- "you bet I did, and I enjoyed it!" --
should be good enough for the rest of us.

Right, dude?

There is still huge hypocrisy in the New York drug laws. It's spread a whole
lot broader than the ridiculous sentences in the Rockefeller laws. Mere pot
possessors, caught with tiny amounts for personal use, are still being sent
to jail by the thousands in New York.

Taking police away from more important duties. Turning otherwise law-abiding
citizens into criminals.

Fifty thousand people were arrested by the NYPD for small marijuana
possession in the year 2000, up from 2,000 in 1992. And so far at least,
Bloomberg has shown no inclination to reverse Giuliani's harsh approach.

These are people who did what the new mayor did -- and enjoyed it.

Questioned at City Hall yesterday, Bloomberg said he was still opposed to
decriminalization.

"I'm very much in favor of enforcing laws on the books," he said, responding
to the new ad campaign for the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws. But he added: "If we don't want to enforce laws on the books
we should remove them from the books."

Was it a hint?

A smoke signal of some kind?

Maybe not. But here at last, amid the smoke and the humor, was one perfectly
sober idea.