Smoking Out Dole’s Line on Marijuana

Of all the prissy and petty complaints that have come to define Bob Dole’s election campaign, his TV ads raising Clinton’s single, abortive youthful experiment with marijuana as a test of the president’s character takes the cake. It’s also lousy politics, since 60 million voters admit to having survived an even more intense personal experience with marijuana than did Clinton--they managed, at least once, to inhale.

Like Clinton, I have not been able to inhale without choking, not even cigarette smoke. Call us respiratorily challenged. Indeed, that’s why I became addicted to cigars long before they were fashionable; you don’t inhale. A costly habit, however, even before Schwarzenegger made nicotine-loaded stogies “in”--it’s hard for me to believe that my old buddies who stuck with reefers have taken greater health risks or wasted more money. And that’s without counting the sums I’ve spent on expensive cabernets, my other addiction.

But inhaling marijuana is bad, and an enlightened public health advocate might urge marijuana’s use in cooking instead of smoking. Dole could take the lead, offering his favorite brownie recipe for medical marijuana use. But that would endanger his solid base of support in the tobacco industry, by suggesting that smoking carries any risks at all.

Last week during my annual physical, the doctor didn’t ask me if I had ever eaten pot brownies, but he did once again warn me to go easy on the cigars and booze. Don’t I get any points for a lifetime of remaining loyal to the legal vices? Surely a long abstinence from marijuana inhaling must have extended my life expectancy.

Evidently not. I called the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and talked to the man in charge of churning out the death statistics. I asked how many people die from using marijuana. Not, I cautioned, from using it along with alcohol and other drugs, which is the government’s usual composite figure, but just from using marijuana by its lonesome like a good old Deadhead would.

Well, he hemmed and hawed before finally telling me that in 1994, the last year for which we have reliable data, the answer is . . . none. What? Imagine my disappointment. Surely after all we’ve heard about the drug epidemic, one could count on marijuana, which represents fully 77% of illicit drug use, to have contributed a bit more to the body count. Alcohol, by contrast, causes around 100,000 deaths a year and cigarette smoking more than 400,000--as compared with 20,000 for all illicit drug use.

However, while alcohol and cigarettes may be quite dangerous to your health, they are legal, and that has always been very important to me. Don’t count me among those aging boomers whom Dole charges with leading the young astray. Au contraire, I am one of those chickens who obeys the letter of the law and even gets shouted at by passing motorists for refusing to exceed the posted speed limit. As no less a sage of the ‘60s, Realist magazine editor Paul Krassner, has documented, I was the only person in the Berkeley of that era to refuse to smoke a joint simply because it was illegal. You can just imagine the ridicule I experienced.

But I give that same advice to young people even today: Marijuana may not be as dangerous as alcohol and cigarettes, but if you must risk your health, do it with a dangerous vice that is socially condoned.

That must be what Dole had in mind when he got all excited about a government-reported rise in teenage marijuana smoking while ignoring its more troubling findings for legal drugs: “Binge drinking” was practiced by 4.4 million youths (2.5 times greater than for marijuana) and 4.5 million adolescents are already addicted to cigarettes. Kill yourself the way decent, patriotic, law-abiding, beer-guzzling, chain-smoking Americans always have, and not like some hippie scum.

Those like Dole who want big government to save us from ourselves had better wake up to the fact that alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking combined represent the real epidemic of substance abuse for all U.S. age groups. By comparison, the number of illicit drug users is half of what it was in the peak year of 1979.

Why doesn’t Dole return to that true spirit of Kansas Puritanism, as it was in his youth, and call for prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes? That way the nation would have a consistent substance-abuse policy, the anti-drug and prison industry would grow even faster, and we, as Bob Dole has urged, would arrest our moral decline and begin the ascent to the levels of purity enjoyed now only by more enlightened nations. Like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.