cannabisnews.com: A Whole Lot of Us Need to Come Clean!





A Whole Lot of Us Need to Come Clean!
Posted by FoM on August 24, 1999 at 15:34:02 PT
By Robert Scheer
Source: LA Times
Gary E. Johnson for president! Who's he? The Republican governor of New Mexico and just about the only politician in the country with the gumption to admit he used marijuana and cocaine in his youth and lived to tell the tale.
Unlike too many hypocrites of his generation, Johnson has the guts to challenge that monumental tribute to bureaucratic stupidity known as the war on drugs, a $40-billion program that's made America the world's biggest jailer of innocent people.   Johnson, 46, has pledged to retire from politics when his second term as governor ends, so a presidential run is unlikely. But his honesty stands in startling relief to politicians of both parties who act as if ignorance of the effects of drugs is a prerequisite to wisdom on the subject.   Pretending never to have tried illegal drugs makes it easier to demonize all banned drugs as equally destructive and far more threatening to public order than socially condoned alcohol. Ignorance about drug abuse makes it easier to treat it as a criminal rather than medical problem. Johnson boasts no such ignorance.   "I smoked marijuana in college; that was something I did," he told the New York Times last week, adding, "I used cocaine on a couple of occasions. It was not something that anybody would have ever known. But I knew if I was going to run for office, I should 'fess up. And if I didn't win, so be it."   Which is what George W. Bush and Bill Clinton should have had the temerity to say concerning their own drug experience. Users or not, they were of a generation that survived wide experimentation with drugs, and it's unseemly that they're now willing to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people by throwing them in jail for doing what was common practice in their day.   Clinton has pushed the drug crusade with a fervor sadly lacking in other areas of endeavor, beginning most strikingly with indifference to the poverty that leaves ghetto youth vulnerable to seductions of the drug trade. Bush, as governor of Texas, has pushed for increasing penalties for drug use.   But if Bush were honest, he'd have to admit that his youthful encounter with the drug culture--even if it was as innocent as knowing the stuff was around fraternity row--paled in significance to his entanglement with alcohol. Whatever attraction illegal drugs held did not last, he tells us, past his 28th year, but alcohol was a severe enough problem that he felt compelled to go cold turkey at the age of 40. Clearly in his experience, booze was the hard one to shake.   That's the experience of most Americans. All evidence indicates that for many, alcohol addiction is far more enduring and socially destructive. According to drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey, "Probably 70 million Americans have used an illegal drug--one-third of all Americans age 12 and over. Americans who once tried an illegal drug overwhelmingly have walked away from drug abuse." That's not an argument for using illegal drugs, but a recognition that they're not so blindingly addictive as McCaffrey's hysterical anti-drug crusade insists.   Abuse of any drug--illegal or not--is of serious concern, but it remains fundamentally a medical not a criminal problem, and the pathology of the disease varies with individuals. Criminal law should concern the immense adverse social consequence of abuse, say in the form of wife-beating or auto accidents, and on that score, attention should turn primarily to alcohol.   Alcohol causes more than 100,000 deaths a year, while federal statistics report no deaths due solely to marijuana use. Laws that deal with the consequence of drug use--for example, driving under the influence--should be firmly enforced. But drug-induced escapism that merely wastes one's time, mind and body is no business of the cops.   Clearly, our drug policy is an inconsistent hodgepodge, causing more misery than drugs themselves. But we will not begin to seriously reexamine this question until politicians, and the reporters who cover them, come out of the closet and share their own experiences on the subject. Many of us know more about how wrongheaded the drug policy debate is from our own experience than we've been willing to admit. How many reporters hounding Bush these past weeks can honestly say they never used illegal drugs or deny that alcohol, which flows freely on every campaign press plane, has not been a greater scourge in their lives? I can't.   If Bush would come clean and tell us what he really knows about drug use, it would be one good reason to vote for the man. But I don't expect it. He's no Gary E. Johnson. Pubdate: August 24, 1999Robert Scheer Is a Times Contributing EditorCopyright 1999 Los Angeles Times
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Comment #1 posted by Freedom Fighter on August 25, 1999 at 00:29:12 PT
Gary Johnson for President
I would gladly donate time, money, and effort for Mr. Johnson. He is honest and forthright. 
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