Reefer Madness: Feds Go Ballistic on Pot Measures

Why is federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey putting down the voters of Arizona and California for taking the first rational steps toward ending this nation’s insane drug policy? Why is the Clinton administration threatening to jail terminally ill patients and the physicians who help them use marijuana to ease their pain?

McCaffrey had zero experience with drug policy before Clinton, in an election-year maneuver, appointed the retired Army general head of the DEA. But McCaffrey quickly became a zealot in the drug war that has filled the jails without decreasing the availability of drugs. In the last election, the general went to war against the California and Arizona initiatives and is furious that voters did not obey his command. He quickly assembled a gathering of law enforcement officials to figure out how to undermine the will of the voters.

Not to be outdone, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, that insufferable Miss Goody-Two-Shoes, has promised federal felony charges against anyone who tries to use marijuana under the new state laws. Why this hysteria over what are two extremely limited state experiments?

In California, you still need a physician’s approval to use marijuana for medical purposes. The Arizona law, which passed with a convincing 65% of the vote, goes further in the direction of decriminalization. In addition to allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana, the initiative, passed with bipartisan support including the state’s former Sens. Barry Goldwater and Dennis DeConcini, prohibits prison terms for first- and second-time drug possession offenders and offers treatment instead.

The Clinton administration should welcome these efforts by states to experiment with the substance-abuse issue. As with alcohol, who knows better than local people about where it should be sold and to whom? The states have always had varying laws on alcohol sales, and when the feds attempted to set policy though a blanket prohibition, it almost destroyed the country. Ironically, when alcohol was illegal, marijuana was not. Indeed, marijuana was legal in this country until 1937, which mocks the notion that its recent use has led to a decline in the nation’s values.

It is absurd to treat marijuana as more dangerous than alcohol, and there are just too many Americans who have had experience with both substances to keep the official lie going. This is one issue on which the public knows what it’s talking about. For years, Americans have been bombarded with insultingly simplistic anti-drug propaganda in the schools, at their work places and in the media.

But the undifferentiated approach that lumps marijuana with harder drugs denies a reality that too many voters have personally experienced. According to the DEA, 60 million Americans have tried marijuana and know that it did not destroy their lives. The president stands as living proof. During his Oxford days, joints were being smoked all around him, and yet he was able to limit his experimentation. Why does he not trust others to do the same?

What better way to answer questions concerning drug abuse than local experimentation of the sort that voters in California and Arizona approved? If we learn that marijuana is indeed no more dangerous than alcohol, think of the prison cells we could free up for violent criminals now set loose before they serve their full sentence because there is no space to accommodate them.

I know this upsets those folks who have been bombarding us with anti-drug ads all these years. But decriminalizing marijuana does not mean approval. Those civic-minded advertising executives could continue to warn young people about the risks of substance abuse, but they should also run ads warning about the dangers of beer drinking. Have they never noticed that our young people are constantly exposed to TV commercials that identify beer guzzling with the good life?

And now we have been informed by the distillers that even hard liquor will be advertised in prime time. What hypocrisy to permit cigarettes and alcohol to be aggressively promoted in the mass media while physicians risk arrest for prescribing marijuana to terminally ill patients. The facts are that 400,000 deaths a year can be attributed to cigarette smoking, 50,000 to drinking alcohol and none directly to marijuana use.

Enough. We have to begin somewhere to inform drug policy with logic and to take some modest pragmatic steps back from the quagmire that is the war on drugs. The voters in California and Arizona are to be congratulated for having done just that, and the president and his generals should just get out of their way.