Skipping Towards Gomorrah

by Dan Savage

  “DARE participants are likelier to use drugs in the future than students who haven’t participated in the program,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Salim Muwakkil, referring to the University of Illinois study. “[DARE presents students] with kindergarten stories about the demonic evils of drugs and the despicable characters who use them. In such a cardboard world, drug users can’t grow up to be presidents.”

  But pot users do grow up to be presidents—they also grow up and win gold medals. Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati won a gold medal at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, a medal that was almost taken away from him when he tested positive for marijuana (a performance de-hancing drug). When Rebagliati tried to enter the United States for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, American immigration officials, perhaps busy with Mohammad Atta’s student visa application, refused to let Rebagliati enter the United States. During the controversy over his drug test in Japan, Rebagliati had admitted to smoking marijuana in the past. (Rebagliati claimed he tested positive for marijuana at the Olympics after inhaling secondhand pot smoke at a party. Sure you did, Ross, sure you did. . . .) Rebagliati got to keep his medal, but because he was now an admitted pot smoker, the government of the United States regarded him as a dangerous criminal.

  “If Ross Rebagliati is forbidden from entering the U.S.,” said Keith Stroup, Executive Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), “how is it that Paul Mc-Cartney—an outspoken marijuana activist and convicted pot smoker—was allowed entry to this country to perform at [the 2002] Super Bowl?”

  If past pot use is enough to keep Ross Rebagliati out of the country, how is it that Clarence Thomas gets to sit on the Supreme Court? How is it that more people voted for Al Gore than voted for the son of the man who appointed a pothead to the Supreme Court? How is it that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush get to be president? How is it that Willie Nelson, who once told ABC News that he smokes pot on a daily basis, gets to sing “America the Beautiful” at patriotic rallies after September 11? Young people have finely tuned bullshit detectors, and nothing annoys young people more than adult hypocrisy, and on the issue of pot, adults, teachers, DARE educators, and politicians positively reek of it. We know marijuana, used in moderation, is harmless, and millions and millions of Americans know it from personal experience—and that includes lots of Americans who are currently running this country.

  When it comes to marijuana, the scare tactics don’t work, they don’t keep kids off drugs, and every time a kid turns on the television set or looks at a newspaper, he sees proof that marijuana users don’t go directly to jail. What’s worse, the use of scare tactics around a relatively harmless drug like marijuana undermines the best arguments against the use of harder, more addictive drugs. Heroin and crack and methamphetamines really are addictive, they really do kill people, and people who use these drugs really do wind up in jail or in hospitals or in psych wards. But if adults and politicians and parents cry wolf over pot, skeptical teenagers angry about being lied to and manipulated wind up tuning out truthful messages about drugs that are scary. (“Once it’s clear that you’ve been had, it’s easy to ignore the whole spiel.”)

  Which is exactly what kids are doing. According to the New York Times, between 1991 and 2001 the number of twelfth graders who have used pot jumped from 37 percent to 49 percent, while the number of tenth graders who used pot jumped from 23 to 40 percent, and the number of eighth graders who have smoked pot doubled, from 10 percent to 20 percent. Again, I’m not in favor of kids smoking pot, but I’d rather my twelfth grader smoked pot than drank beer—and I can’t imagine that I’m the only parent in America who feels that way.

  Predictably, social conservatives look at these numbers and conclude that the rise in pot use by kids is All Bill Clinton’s Fault (ABCF). Clinton was soft on drugs, they insist, and the federal government under Clinton failed to prosecute the drug war vigorously, which led to these upticks in pot use among kids. As with most ABCFs, this one doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. “Approximately 1.5 million Americans [were] arrested on marijuana charges during the first three years of Clinton’s administration,” according to NORML, “84% of them for simple possession. The average number of yearly marijuana arrests under Clinton (483,548) is 30 percent higher than under the [first] Bush administration (338,998).”

  The government’s latest scare tactic was rolled out during the 2002 Super Bowl.

  The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy spent $3.4 million to air two thirty-second anti-drug spots during the Super Bowl. The campaign alleges that the illegal drug trade funds terrorism, and that Americans who use drugs are aiding terrorists. The ad campaign was paid for out of a National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a five-year, $1.5 billion program funded by Congress in 1997 to allow the drug czar’s office to purchase advertising on various media outlets. Not being a big fan of pro-football, I missed the commercials on television. I did, however, catch the print ads in the papers.

  “Last weekend,” read text superimposed over a young man’s face, “I washed my car, hung out with a few friends, and helped murder a family in Colombia. C’mon, it was a party.”

  At the bottom of the ad, the copy reads, “Drug money helps support terror. Buy drugs and you could be supporting it too.”

  The ads direct readers to a Web site, theantidrug.com, where I found this: “If you’re using drugs in America, whether you’re shooting heroin, snorting cocaine, taking Ecstasy or sharing a joint in your friend’s back yard, evidence is mounting that what you’re doing may be connected to events far beyond your own existence.” (Emphasis added.)

  There’s one big problem with this campaign (well, there are dozens of problems with it, but I want to talk about pot): American pot smokers don’t buy marijuana from terrorists. Eleven of the twelve groups on the government’s list of terror organizations with links to drug trafficking are based in the Middle East and Colombia, which are not pot-growing regions. The twelfth is a Basque terror group known to traffic in heroin, not pot.

  “The majority of America’s illicit drug users are solely marijuana smokers, and do not use other drugs such as heroin or illegal opiates,” said Keith Stroup, Executive Director of NORML. “It is patently absurd to suggest that marijuana smokers are in any way supporting terrorism. The overwhelming majority of marijuana consumed in this country is domestically grown or imported from Mexico, Jamaica, or Canada.”

  Americans are going to keep using drugs—we always have and we always will. “The drive to alter consciousness is as ancient as humanity itself,” Salim Muwakkil writes in the Chicago Tribune. “Some anthropologists argue that psychoactive substances are so common to so many cultures, their use may have some evolutionary benefit.”

  The human desire for psychoactive drugs is never going away—the war on drugs, however, can and should go away. If the government is truly interested in cutting off the flow of drug money to terror groups, then George W. Bush should be talking about legalizing drugs, which is possible, and not halting drug consumption, which is impossible. At the very least, the government should be encouraging Americans who want to alter their consciousness to stick to home-grown pot, and not imported coke or heroin. Again, most of the pot smoked in the United States is grown in the United States, and legalizing pot—legalizing all illegal drugs—would get the profits out of the hands of crooks and terrorists and into the hands of big business people and the politicians they support. For Republicans, drug legalization is a win-win.

  In keeping with the theme of sloth, I would like to lift seven wonderful arguments in favor of legalizing pot from a brilliant piece I stumbled across in a national magazine.

  1. “Marijuana is widely used, and for the vast majority of its users is nearly harmless. . . .”

  2. “Most people who use marijuana, even people who use it with moderate frequency, don’t go on to use any other illegal drug. . . . ‘There is no evidence,’ says [the National Academy of Sciences], tha
t marijuana serves as a stepping stone [to harder drugs].”7

  3. “Two researchers in 1991 studied the addictiveness of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. Both ranked caffeine and marijuana as the least addictive. [One] ranked marijuana as slightly less addictive than caffeine.”

  4. “A small minority of people who smoke it may—by choice, as much as any addictive compulsion—eventually smoke enough of it for a long enough period of time to suffer impairments so subtle that they may not affect every day functioning or be permanent. Arresting, let alone jailing, people for using such a drug seems outrageously disproportionate.”

  5. “For the overwhelming majority of its users marijuana is not the least bit dangerous.”

  6. “If it’s on the basis of effect—namely, intoxication—that [drug warrior] William Bennett considers marijuana immoral, then he has to explain why it’s different from drunkenness, and why this particular sense of well-being should be banned in an America that is now the great mood-altering nation, with millions of people on Prozac and other drugs primarily meant to make them feel good.”

  7. “Drug warriors recently have tried to argue that research showing marijuana acts on the brain in a way vaguely similar to cocaine and heroin—plugging into the same receptors—proves that it somehow ‘primes’ the brain for harder drugs. But alcohol has roughly the same action, and no one argues that Budweiser creates heroin addicts.”

  What lefty publication did I find this pro-pot piece in? The Nation? The Progressive? The American Prospect? No, I found it in National Review, the hard-right home of William F. Buckley Jr. (“Weed Whackers: The Anti-Marijuana Forces and Why They’re Wrong,” Richard D. Lowry, National Review, August 20, 2001). Do not despair, right wingers: National Review hasn’t gone soft on us. In the same issue that Lowry, the magazine’s editor, came out swinging for pot, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, Kenneth L. Connor, wrote, “. . . even in a system of representative self-government, the people do not have a right to do what is wrong.” And who gets to determine what is and isn’t wrong? Connor didn’t say, and National Review’s get-the-government-off-our-backs editors didn’t challenge him on the point.

  Nevertheless, on account of the Richard Lowry piece on pot, I am now a proud subscriber to—and the occasional ripper-upper of—National Review, a magazine that hates only trial lawyers and Susan Sontag more than it hates homosexuals. (If Susan Sontag spoke before an organization of gay trial lawyers, well, that might give the editorial board of National Review brain aneurysms all around.) But, hey, politics makes strange bedfellows, and why should the politics of pot be an exception? In the spirit of strange bedfellows, Richard Lowry has a standing invitation to crawl into bed with me, my boyfriend, a bag of chips, and a single joint. We’ll get baked, and watch Showgirls on video. Lowry is a busy man, and he could probably use the occasional pot getaway just as much as or more than I can. This bud’s for you, Rich.

  But Lowry’s voice is a lonely one on the right—and on the left, for that matter. Marijuana came no closer to being legalized under eight years of Bill Clinton, who didn’t inhale, and Vice President Al Gore, who is rumored to have spent a few years doing little else. Bill Clinton’s drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was something of a pathological liar. “The murder rate in Holland is double that in the United States,” McCaffrey said on CNN. “That’s drugs.” In reality, the Dutch homicide rate is one-fourth that of the United States. “The most dangerous drug in America is a twelve-year-old smoking pot because they put themselves in this enormous statistical probability of having a [hard] drug problem,” McCaffrey said on CNN in 1997. In reality, for every ten people who have used marijuana, there is only one regular user of cocaine and less than one heroin addict.

  No one who smokes pot is under any delusions about George W. Bush pulling a Nixon-in-China on marijuana decriminalization, but his choice for drug czar still came as something of a shock. On the campaign trail, Bush made noises about treating marijuana more as a public health issue and less as a criminal justice issue. Once he was elected, Bush reversed course, appointing John Walters, a former deputy of William J. Bennett, as his drug czar. Walters believes in tossing nonviolent drug users in jail, and like his old boss, Bill Bennett, Walters refuses to acknowledge that there’s any difference between smoking a little marijuana and shooting a whole lot of heroin. It’s hard to imagine that Walters, Bennett, and Bush—all baby boomers—don’t know dozens if not hundreds of friends, former college classmates, coworkers, and family members who smoked pot and lived to tell the tale.

  While most politicians know from personal experience that marijuana is utterly harmless, boomers taking over all the top jobs in Washington isn’t moving pot any closer to legalization, thanks to political cowardice. It doesn’t help that their own drug-war rhetoric has boxed them into a corner; like the Catholic Church on the issues of birth control, celibacy, and female priests, the federal government’s rhetoric on drugs has left it precious little wiggle room. “We were wrong” isn’t something the feds or the Vatican have an easy time saying. At the rate we’re going, matricide will be decriminalized before marijuana—at least in the United States.

  Canada is moving towards decriminalization, as is Great Britain. In March of 2002, Tony Blair’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) recommended that “all cannabis preparations” be essentially decriminalized. Unlike the United States, which arrests and prosecutes 600,000 marijuana users (not dealers, users) every year, Great Britain is moving towards the Holland model: the possession of small amounts of pot won’t be prosecuted, and the sale of marijuana will be tolerated in Dutch-style “cafés.”

  “The high use of cannabis is not associated with major health problems for the individual or society,” according to Britain’s ACMD, “[and] the occasional use of cannabis is only rarely associated with significant problems in otherwise healthy individuals.” According to the London Evening Standard, “[the ACMD] makes it clear that alcohol is far more damaging than cannabis to health and society at large because it encourages risk-taking and leads to aggressive and violent behaviour.”

  The Brits haven’t discovered something we don’t already know. In 1972, Richard Nixon’s National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommended that marijuana use and possession be decriminalized; in 1982, the National Academy of Sciences not only recommended that marijuana use and possession be decriminalized, “but that lawmakers give serious consideration to creating a system or regulated distribution,” as well, according to NORML. In 2000, a long-term study conducted by Kaiser Permanente found that not only wasn’t there a link between regular marijuana use and death but also that the marijuana prohibition represented the only real health risk to the user. (Ask anyone who was raped in a holding cell after being picked up for marijuana possession.) Kaiser recommended that, “medical guidelines regarding prudent use . . . be established, akin to the common-sense guidelines that apply to alcohol use.”

  American politicians, unlike their British and Canadian counterparts, refuse to wake up to reality. Pot isn’t a threat to our health, our nation’s productivity, or our national security.

  Voters seem to get it. Medical-marijuana initiatives have passed in Alaska; Arizona; California; Colorado; Hawaii; Maine; Nevada; Oregon; Washington State; and Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2000, voters in California approved a state initiative that mandated treatment, not jail time, for nonviolent drug offenders. There is one glimmer of hope among our elected representatives; in Vermont the State House of Representatives passed a medical marijuana bill in March of 2002. (Vermont’s Democratic governor plans to veto the bill if it makes it through the Vermont Senate.) As Lowry pointed out in National Review, “[medical marijuana] is the camel’s nose under the tent for legalization, and so—for many of its advocates—it is. Both sides in the medical-marijuana controversy have ulterior motives, which suggests it may be time to stop debating the nose and move on to the full camel.” Debating th
e camel is good for pot legalization, since all the facts support legalization. Indeed, it was examining the facts that forced the reliably conservative National Review to go all wobbly on marijuana prohibition. I live in hope that one day marijuana will be as legal as it is widely available.

  Will some people smoke too much pot after marijuana is legalized? Sure they will—but they’re the same people who already smoke too much pot. Countries that have decriminalized marijuana possession haven’t seen a surge in marijuana consumption. Americans who want pot now already have pot. The idea that prohibition is all that stands between people who wanna get high and pot is absurd; it’s one more faulty assumption heaped on the drug warrior’s vast pile of faulty assumptions. The idea that legalizing pot will make us a nation of out-of-control stoners can be demolished with one word: beer. In addition to being addictive, inebriating, and potentially life-threatening, beer is also perfectly legal, culturally celebrated, and widely advertised. And yet we’re not a nation of drunks. Why? Because the vast majority of us don’t want to be drunk all the time. Even people who like to get drunk once in a while don’t want to be drunk every day.

  Robert Bork disagrees. He looks at Americans and sees a people that, but for the intervention of the state, can’t control themselves. “An increasing number of alienated, restless individuals, individuals without strong ties to others, except in the pursuit of ever more degraded distractions and sensations. And liberalism has no corrective within itself; all it can do is endorse more liberty and demand more rights,” Bork writes in Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Like most Americans, I have sought out distractions and sensations that Bork would regard as degraded. (One man’s degraded distraction is another man’s pursuit of happiness.) Bork assumes that a man who pursues happiness in places or with plants he doesn’t care for can never be satisfied, that he must go from degraded distraction to degraded distraction. However, like most Americans, I don’t need the architects of “liberalism” to instill in me a sense of control or balance. I have a corrective within myself (it’s called being a sensible adult), liberalism doesn’t have to stick one in me like some sort of vibrating butt plug.