History by Magazine -- Our dopey war on drugs
My high praise for Rolling Stone's anti-drug war package was a hit with its editor Jann Wenner, but not with my boss. My weekly take on America's news, culture and ideas from exactly 30 years ago.
I wrote many of the headlines for my magazine columns, but not this good one.
After ‘Only dopes support drug war’ appeared in the Post-Gazette editor John Craig called me into his office and told me to keep the politics out of my column.
I smart-assedly said, “Politics? Or my politics?”
I was doing the weekly column in the first place in part because I wanted to insert my libertarian politics into the PG, which otherwise was at least 93.8 percent Clinton Democrat, pro-union, pro City Hall, pro taxes, etc., etc.
Rolling Stone founder/editor Jann Wenner sent me a nice note thanking me for my teeny contribution to the war on the war on drugs that he tirelessly waged in his pages for decades.
The next week, when Richard Nixon died, the order from Boss Craig to keep politics out of my magazine column was not easy to follow.
In Tricky Dick’s honor, in my column about how magazines had covered Nixon’s demise, I left a blank space that I called “a paragraph of silence.” Boss Craig — who policed political opinions in every corner of the PG — never said anything about it.