Loony drug laws - Column

National Review, Feb 6, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

She is my baby sister, I am her godfather, and though she has run her own life for many years there is now, however temporary, a dependency, or rather a need, and it boils the blood with anger that I cannot help her. Why? Because the idiot squad might see the transaction and put one or both of us in jail.

What she wants is, as she puts it, a little "cannabis." Because she is undergoing a jolt of chemotherapy resulting in racking nausea. How does she know cannabis would help her? Dumb question. a) She knows, or knows of, people who have had relief from the wretchedness she suffers, through a puff or two of marijuana; and b) so what if it did not work? If she doesn't get relief, she doesn't get relief; end experiment. What are we afraid of, that while recovering from cancer and taking a marijuana cigarette she will become a crack addict?

I said to her over the telephone: "Why don't you just go out on the street and get it?" Answer: "I know it's all over the place, but I don't know where physically to go. And anyway, all the vendors expect people in their teens or twenties, and I wouldn't fit. They'd look at me suspiciously."

"Why don't you get Ann" (her daughter lives 25 miles away) "to go and get it for you?" Answer: "I wouldn't ask her. She's totally law-abiding, and I wouldn't want to embarrass her."

So why doesn't her big brother, sitting here in New York pecking away on the word processor, haul his big behind to get some and send it to her? Answer: Because big brother actually doesn't know to turn right or left when he leaves the building, wonders (since he is a resourceful type) whether he should buy one of those trained dogs and ask him to lead big brother to the nearest marijuana plant. But mostly because big brother is a coward, and there is just that chance that a lurking narc would spot him paying cash for enough marijuana to relieve baby sister and decide that was a dreamy photo op, I mean not on the order of Zapruder or Rodney King, but it would be fun to be the cause of sending that right-wing encephalophone off to prison for a couple of years for violating the drug laws.

Newt reported a couple of weeks ago that he had heard it said that one-quarter of the White House staff had been taking drugs in the years leading up to their employment in the White House. This was denounced by Leon Panetta et al. as the most irresponsible blather yet from that king of irresponsibility. But then, as reported in this journal recently, somebody noticed the 1991 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. What it said was that 18.4 per cent of respondents between the ages of 26 and 34 reported that they had used an illegal drug during the last year.

Now people tend to protect their own reputations, even anonymously. Nobody, answering a poll, would confess to having racial prejudice. So we can assume that if 18 per cent reported having experimented with an illegal drug, probably the figure was higher. So? So then if the government's own surveyors inform us that approximately 25 per cent of the people of that age occasionally use an illegal drug, why should the young people who went to work for the White House be different? It isn't as if Mr. Clinton's White House were approached as one might approach work for a Carthusian monastery.

Probably the drug these people had used was marijuana. Statistics published on December 13 report a slight increase by school-age children in the use of that drug. What about the war on drugs? Well, what about it? Should we fight it more fiercely? Execute the kids?

Thinking on the subject is so far gone in putrefaction that the simplest questions go unanswered. Researchers in San Francisco spent a couple of years developing a plan for exploring the clinical effects of cannabis on people suffering from certain maladies. They proposed to test the effectiveness of the drug in treating the wasting syndrome associated with AIDS. But--the Drug Enforcement Administration has contrived to get the National Institute on Drug Abuse to deny the necessary marijuana for testing.

You shut your eyes in frustration. If somebody discovered that marijuana would cure AIDS, would the narcs still prowl the streets for vendors?