Skipping Towards Gomorrah (18 page)

One reason we're told we can't legalize pot is because it would send a “mixed message” to kids. I don't understand why we can't tell kids the same thing about pot that we tell them about beer: It's for adults. That might make pot seem like a “forbidden,” grown-up pleasure, but I don't see how “for adults only” makes something any more alluringly forbidden than “so much fun it's illegal.” Maybe our message to kids should be the facts: Recreational drugs can be hard on your system, they aren't good for growing bodies, and some drugs are infinitely more dangerous than others. Of all the drugs you shouldn't be using—which includes booze—pot is the least dangerous. While we would prefer you not to use drugs while you're young, if you're going to use drugs, please use them in a safe place, don't drive on drugs, and drugs are no excuse for engaging in risky behaviors you wouldn't otherwise perform.

Or we could teach kids that soft drugs like pot, much like booze, is something that can be safely enjoyed in moderation. In an editorial about drinking, the
Wall Street Journal
's Michael Judge complained about local governments and universities banning happy hours, two-for-ones, and other drink promotions. “The problem,” Judge writes, “is that many Americans see boozing as somehow immoral. . . . Studies by the Berkeley Alcohol Research Group and a host of others find that nations that teach children moderation over abstinence, such as France, Spain, and Italy, may have higher overall rates of alcohol consumption, but far lower rates of alcoholism and alcohol-related disease.” Encouraging responsible indulgence, Judge concludes, “is a sure way to guard against excess than preaching abstention.” Why can't we take—and why isn't the
Wall Street Journal
promoting—the same approach when it comes to pot?

Yes, it might mean delivering the dreaded “mixed message,” but the truth is often a mixed message. Right wingers always and left wingers often want all or nothing, black or white, when it's often neither or both. The truth is, not all drugs are created equal, and the mix of different drugs available in American schools requires a mix of messages. Again, I'm not in favor of encouraging kids to use drugs. Kids do use drugs, though, and they're familiar with drugs, and that means messages we send them about drugs must have something to do with reality or the kids will tune them out. Currently the only message virtuecrats want people to give kids is that all drugs are equally bad, equally harmful, and equally deadly. It's a lie, and they're on to us. We've been giving kids this unmixed message for decades, and kids go right on experimenting with drugs, hard and soft. Why? Because kids are likelier to believe their own eyes and their friends than the lies of drug czars (not that kids watch a lot of C-SPAN) and “educators” who've made it their mission to misinform them.

Here's a case in point: cartoonist/illustrator Ellen Forney drew a one-page comic that appeared in
The Stranger,
the weekly newspaper I edit in Seattle, Washington. Her comic, “How D'Ya Smoke Pot and Stay Out of Jail?,” was full of tips for potheads from a criminal defense lawyer. Two weeks after the comic appeared in
The Stranger,
a package arrived at our offices for Ellen.

“The 6th Grade students in room 9 at Bow Lake Elementary value the core principles of freedom of speech and press,” wrote Jason J. Dodge, a teacher at Bow Lake. “At the same time, we also value productive freedom of press and speech. Interestingly, we ask our children to steer away from things like drugs, alcohol, and other choices that lead to negative experiences. So why, then, do adults write articles informing people how to use drugs without getting caught? My students and I just couldn't figure why someone would write an article supporting the use of illegal drugs.”

Enclosed with Mr. Dodge's letter were more than twenty letters from his sixth-grade students:

“When my teacher showed us your article I was surprised that anybody would write a stupid and useless article,” wrote Amy.

“I'm writing this letter because of how to pot smoke and get away with pot smoke. I think about this article that is bad because it is helping people how to pot smoke but I think it is bad to pot smoke,” wrote Josh, barely.

“Do you know that drugs can take away 20 or 30 years of your life? Also they can kill you or you can become high and drive and kill other people, and they can become addicted,” wrote Nicole.

“You have the right to freedom of the press but you also have the right to remain silence,” wrote Artem.

“If you wrote this in a different country, you would get your hands cut off and be sent to jail forever,” wrote A Concerned Sixth Grader.

“All people who smoke pot grow up to be criminals. They go to jail,” wrote Galib.

“If you had a child in the sixth grade, would you want him/her to read the article you wrote?” wrote Sammy.

Where do I start?

First of all, Ellen Forney didn't give her comic to a room full of children in the sixth grade. Mr. Dodge did. (Now all of them know how to smoke dope without getting caught—good work, Mr. Dodge!) Second, kids say the darnedest things, don't they? Especially when an authority figure is standing at the front of the classroom and orders them to say the darnedest things. Clearly the children in Mr. Dodge's class don't know the first thing about marijuana—the first true thing, I should say. What they do know about marijuana—it shortens your life by twenty years, you'll die, you'll go to jail, you'll be a criminal—is nothing but a bunch of lies drilled into their little heads by Mr. Dodge and police officers from the Drug Awareness Resistance Education (DARE) programs.

Mr. Dodge and DARE may be able to fool a room full of sixth graders into believing that people who “pot smoke” are all criminals who wind up in jail or dead. But what's going to happen to Mr. Dodge's students when they get into high school or college and start meeting other kids and adults who've smoked pot and weren't harmed by it and refuse to “remain silence” in the face of DARE hysteria and scare tactics? I wonder how Mr. Dodge's kids will react to the news that former President Bill Clinton smoked pot. Can you imagine the looks on their little faces when they find out that former Vice President Al Gore smoked pot, as did former Senator Bill Bradley, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and New York Governor George Pataki? George W. Bush refuses to deny that he ever smoked pot, which strikes the high school students I know as an admission of guilt.

What happens when kids who have been lied to about drugs grow up and discover the truth?

“In junior high, the drug-free group was the place to be,” writes Marissa K. Kingen, a freelance writer. “I was an enthusiastic member.” When Kingen got to high school she learned that, “the Red Ribbon anti-drug week was a joke, and only stoners wore DARE T-shirts. (Many of our teachers had to look up ‘irony' in the dictionary.)” At college, Kingen's eyes were opened to the reality of marijuana. “When you get to college, no matter what college, it's pretty easy to look around your hall and find someone who smokes pot casually and has not ruined his or her life. This undermines the entire extremist message [of] our government-run ‘education' programs. . . . Once it's clear that you've been had, it's easy to ignore the whole spiel.”

Most researchers who have looked into the effectiveness of DARE/scare programs have shown them not to have any impact on whether or not kids use drugs later in life; some researchers have even found that DARE actually backfires. The U.S. Surgeon General and the National Academy of Sciences have issued reports that describe DARE programs as ineffective. A University of Kentucky study found DARE had no measurable impact on drug use; a six-year study at the University of Illinois found that children who had been subjected to DARE's scare tactics were more likely to use drugs in high school.

“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).”

 

T
he 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.)