Lit_Match

Politicians need to clear the air and debate drug laws
07-17-07|Star-Tribune|By Nick Coleman

Eighty million Americans have smoked marijuana, including me.

I tried it five or six times, only because I am a slow learner. I am allergic to weeds. Nothing kills an illicit high faster than a sneezing fit.

But there are worse things than being allergic to marijuana. You could be allergic to common sense.

This country gets the hives when it thinks about changing direction in the war on drugs, which is being lost, with a large toll in ruined lives. Not just the lives ruined by hard drugs, but the lives ruined by the hard lines of politicians who know that the laws against marijuana possession are worse than the drug itself.

A couple of weeks ago, an old college pal of Norm Coleman called on Minnesota's senior senator to lighten the penalties for marijuana use. But that effort to point out the hypocrisy of a politician turned into a mudslinging free-for-all with three candidates for the Senate on the defensive about drug use of decades ago.

Remember that old anti-drug TV ad with eggs sizzling in a frying pan? Well, this is your campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota. And this is your campaign on drugs.

Norman Kent, a Florida lawyer, was a pal of Coleman's at Hofstra University in the late 1960s. He wrote an open letter to Coleman (see it at www.celebstoner.com/content/view/243/34) in which he describes "a four-year haze" of marijuana smoke at Hofstra. Kent is on the board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), a group that wants to legalize marijuana use by adults.

He wrote his letter after a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which claimed that marijuana use leads teens to become gang members.

The "gang" he and Coleman belonged to smoked marijuana and became lawyers, doctors and professors. One even went on to be a U.S. senator from Minnesota. But if Coleman had been arrested and charged under today's laws, he never would have made it.

"I was pointing out the hypocrisy of this one-time pot smoker who has scores of [college] friends he's still willing to criminalize," Kent says. "The laws he supports today would have prevented him from becoming who he is, and that's unacceptable to me, his old friend. Although I might not be his friend anymore."

Unfortunately, Kent's effort turned into a finger-pointing scrum in which candidates for Republican Coleman's seat reacknowledged the drug use in their pasts but said nothing about how the laws should be changed. So we learned DFLer Mike Ciresi smoked dope. "I did inhale," he said. And we heard (yet again) that DFLer Al Franken used drugs during his early years as a writer and performer on "Saturday Night Live."

The real question is not whether the candidates used to be dope heads. The question is whether they are political dopes now -- and hypocrites.

The claim that marijuana leads to the use of more dangerous substances is dubious (a 2002 study by the Rand Corp. found that wasting drug-fighting resources on marijuana might lead to more cocaine and heroin use). But one thing is clear: Marijuana is a gateway drug when it comes to prison. Use it, and you go through prison gates.

According to NORML, 700,000 Americans are arrested in marijuana cases each year, 90 percent merely for possession.

"Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself," former President Jimmy Carter has said. "Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use."

I don't know if marijuana should be legalized. But politicians of both parties are afraid to even discuss alternatives to the costly and ineffective war on drugs. And the cowardice is so pronounced that Gov. Tim Pawlenty has blocked passage of a medical-marijuana law by threatening to veto it. The result? No one will be kept from obtaining marijuana. Except the patients with chronic conditions or pain who will be unable to have marijuana prescribed for them by their doctors.

If you don't think there is something wrong with this state of affairs, I'd like to know what you're smoking.

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Donation links to NORML (The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) | MPP (Marijuana Policy Project)