Pubdate: Fri, 23 Mar 2001
Source: The North Columbia Monthly
Issue: March 2001
Section: Pages 6-7
Copyright: The North Columbia Monthly 2001
Website: http://www.ncmonthly.com/
Address: 103 N. Main  Suite A  Colville, WA 99114 USA
Fax: (509) 684-3109
Contact:  Mark Harrison

POLITICIANS ON DRUGS

Bill Clinton said in his farewell interview with Rolling Stone magazine, "I 
think most small amounts of marijuana have been decriminalized in most 
places and should be.  We really need a reexamination of our entire policy 
on imprisonment."

Good timing, Bill.  We wait eight long years for this enlightenment. Eight 
years that began with not inhaling and ended with the world's record for 
the most marijuana arrests of any administration in the history of 
presidents, kings, queens, tyrants and dictators - 4,175,357 to be exact. 
Our former president and pot smoker is the leading incarcerator of pot 
smokers.  Is this hypocrisy, Bill Clinton or politics as usual?

Vice President Al Gore burned a few bowls himself, according to an 
obviously not authorized biography that describes the 
president-for-about-an-hour-on-election-night as a "regular and chronic" 
marijuana smoker.  Gore admitted to experimenting with marijuana and blamed 
his crime on youthful indiscretions.  But he kept experimenting and 
experimenting and experimenting - for at least four years after he claimed 
to have quit forever.  He was experimenting in college.  He conducted more 
experiments in Vietnam, and as a reporter in Nashville he was still 
experimenting, according to eyewitnesses cited in the book.  Who knows, he 
might be experimenting right now. And though some may argue this point, 
after all that experimentation, Gore's brains aren't as hopelessly 
scrambled in the frying pan of marijuana addiction as the popular 
advertisement suggests they would be.  Gore's brain turned out far better 
than the omelet we were promised by drug war crusaders.

Our Drug Enforcement Agency has confused the illicit drug issue by 
classifying marijuana as a Schedule 1 Drug along with "hard drugs" such as 
heroin and methamphetamine.  If these drugs pose similar threats, why 
should our children believe their "brains on drugs" will be any more 
scrambled by mainlining methamphetamine or heroin than they would by 
smoking marijuana?  Schedule 1 Drugs are classified as having a high abuse 
potential and addictive.  They are said to be potentially lethal and can 
lead to violent behaviour.

Marijuana might lead to violence on a bag of potato chips.  But death? It's 
never happened.  Addiction, maybe, but not as tough as a coffee 
habit.  Maybe the real "gateway drug" to abuse and addiction is 
misinformation and drug war propaganda.

Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who led the Republican charge in 
the 1990s admitted to smoking marijuana in college.  He said, "It was a 
sign that we were alive and in graduate school in that era." But it's not a 
sign of going to graduate school in this era.  It's a sign on the way to jail.

Republican Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico asked a crowd at a rally in 
Albuquerque last year, "Does anyone want to push a button and retroactively 
punish the 80 million Americans who have used illegal drugs?"  The crowd 
roared, "Duh! We don't have enough prisons for the 10 million Americans who 
have used illegal drugs before noon today." Or something like that.

Prior to his election, the two-term governor admitted to using cocaine and 
marijuana.  But he confessed to more than not inhaling and youthful 
indiscretions.  He was a pothead and more.  But today the gubernatorial 
tri-athlete abstains from all drugs, even sugar.

Since dismissing any plan to run for higher officer when his term expires 
in 2002, Johnson has turned up the volume of anti-drug war oratory.  It 
hasn't exactly been politically healthy to acknowledge the drug war's 
failure to curb violence, reduce the flow of drugs, cure addicts and to 
save our children from drug abuse and addiction. But the governor is saying 
what many people know already and many more haven't admitted yet: The drug 
war is a failed attempt by the criminal justice system to solve a public 
health crisis.  Remove the illegal money from the illicit drug trade and 
the criminal element disappears immediately.  Crime rates will plummet and 
the billions of dollars saved can be invested in treatment, education and 
jobs.  With Al Capone and alcohol as instructors, we should have learned 
this lesson 70 years ago.

But taking drug war money away from the judicial industrial complex that 
has become addicted to lucrative asset seizures, privatized prisons, and 
billions in government appropriations is not popular with those on the 
payroll.  But Bush is not popular with those who don't want to see America 
turn into a faith-based charity to oil companies with a voucher program and 
a $400 billion national missile defense system that has proven never to 
work while violating the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty the US signed 
with Russia.  And now every nation but Antarctica wants to gang up on us. 
But that doesn't mean Bush should be illegal.  Does it?

When the little Shrub had his youthful indiscretions he liked nose candy 
the best.  I wonder if John Ashcroft knows about his president's hankering 
for the Texas marching powder.  The attorney general refers to drug addicts 
and recreational users as the "lowest and least" in society and believes 
they should not be rewarded with treatment and truce, but punished with 
prison.  Can this mean that President Bush will be going to jail soon?  The 
leader of the free world who was born on third base and thought that he hit 
a triple might soon be safe behind bars where he poses no threat to anyone? 
No, Bush gets to live in the White House while others who committed similar 
crimes live in the big house.

There is a marijuana arrest about every 45 seconds in the United States. 
Approximately eighty-eight percent are for simple possession. You'd think 
with all these arrests that marijuana would be wiped clean from the face of 
God's green earth by now.  But after a thirty-year drug war and billions of 
dollars spent on drug interdiction, eradication and incarceration, the 
country might as well be a Grateful Dead concert.  Drugs are everywhere. 
Penal construction is booming in the land of the free and we release child 
molesters, rapists, and murderers early so the half million non-violent 
drug offenders will have a place to stay.  American citizens are locked in 
prison today for the same indiscretions that our country's leaders have 
admitted to.  But that's America's drug war for you.  Some drug users can 
be presidents, congressman and governors, and others can be prisoners.
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