De-fang marijuana

So thoroughgoing is the unofficial ban on debate of the nation's drug laws that American politicians prefer smoking pot to talking about it.

They typically try marijuana as teen-agers or young adults, suffer no consequences, then go on to maintain as elected officials that anyone with the temerity to do what they did should be arrested and maybe even jailed.

Once and probably future presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, spent much of his post-adolescence smoking dope and skipping through fields of clover, according to biographer Bill Turque.

He somehow still managed to become one of the most notoriously uptight and ambitious politicians in the country. But Gore, like nearly everyone else, thinks smoking pot should be a criminal offense.

Not everywhere in the world is there such conformity on drug issues. Much of Europe is reconsidering its drug laws - in Britain, the Labor Party recently proposed downgrading the possession of marijuana to a wrist-slapping offense. Meanwhile, in the United States "the war on drugs" grinds pointlessly on.

At least there is some fresh air in the media. John Stossel took an ax to drug-war clichés in a special report on ABC this week.

Drug Enforcement Agency Director Asa Hutchinson had to insist wanly on air that, despite all the billions of dollars spent and countless thousands arrested, the war just hadn't yet been fought hard enough.

He sounded like one of those diehards who argued during the Cold War that socialism hadn't failed, it just had never been truly tried.

When it comes to marijuana, it's unclear why anyone would try to stamp out its use in the first place.

Alcohol and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. In contrast, there is no such thing as a lethal overdose of marijuana.

Yet federal law makes possessing a single joint punishable by up to a year in prison, and many states have similar penalties. There are about 700,000 marijuana arrests in the United States every year, roughly 80 percent for possession.

For the vast majority of its users, marijuana is nearly harmless and represents a temporary enthusiasm.

Most marijuana users are between the ages of 18 and 25, and use plummets after age 34, by which time children and mortgages blunt the appeal of rolling papers and bongs.

Since drug warriors have a hard time arguing that marijuana itself is dangerous, they instead rely on a bank shot: Marijuana's danger is that it leads to the use of drugs that are actually dangerous - it is a so-called "gateway drug."

Not so. According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, "Of 34- to 35-year-old men who had used marijuana 10-99 times by the age 24 to 25, 75 percent never used any other illicit drug."

And users simply don't get addicted to marijuana the way they do harder drugs. One key indicator of the addictiveness of other drugs is that lab rats will self-administer them. Rats won't self-administer THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Two researchers in 1991 studied the addictiveness of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine and marijuana. Both ranked caffeine and marijuana as the least addictive.

Despite the heated rhetoric of the drug war, on marijuana there is a de facto consensus: Legalizers think marijuana laws shouldn't be on the books; prohibitionists think, in effect, that they shouldn't be enforced.

A compromise would be a version of the Dutch model of decriminalization, removing criminal penalties for personal use of marijuana, but keeping the prohibition on street-trafficking and mass cultivation.

That, of course, would require that politicians apply some of the energy they once devoted to enjoying marijuana to discussing forthrightly its legal status. But they prefer to smoke, then keep forever mum.

* Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review, 215 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10016; e-mail: comments.lowry@ nationalreview.com.

No way. still dont believe any of that crud should be legalized. Pot is not harmless to your body and driving under the influence of it is not any safer than alcohol. Heroin addicts are flakey people that have no control over themselves. If you are so anti-drug, account for your position on legalizing pot.

I'm so pro freedom that I'm pro decriminalize vices among consenting adults. Your #30 post was straw man rhetoric. At least have the integrity to make an honest rational argument. But your anti-freedom stance won't allow you to do that.

We are in agreement; I never said that it is the role of the government to control the values. In fact, I stated the opposite. I do not think that legalization is an answer, however.

Lets try and simplify the problem. Suppose 100 people live on an island by themselves. A few poeple, say 10 have discovered that smoking pot makes them feel good. The other 90 people have been told by their leader that pot is dangerous and harmful, so they propose to put the 10 potheads in a stockade.

Now is there any burden of proof on the 90 that pot really is harmful? Or can they just arbitrarily use their "majority" power to imprison their neighbors?

It seems to me that any time we propose to imprison a group of people for any reason, we have a very high burden of proof to show that the behavior is in fact very very harmful to those who do it.

The very fact that people freely choose to smoke pot is evidence to the contrary, so the burden is even higher.

We are in agreement; I never said that it is the role of the government to control the values. In fact, I stated the opposite. I do not think that legalization is an answer, however.

If you look at the history of marijuana prohibition, it is clear that this was an exercise in government attempting to control the values. Do you want that precedent to stand?

We've got one side of the aisle trying to moralize socialism, and the other side trying to socialize morality. If you close your eyes, sometimes you can't tell one from the other.

Bump for a great observation! Republican drug warriors are as socialist and anti-freedom as any Democrap comsymp.

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