Showdown with a Drug Czar
Nineteen years before New York State legalized pot, I tried to tell George W. Bush's top drug cop the government's war on drugs was immoral and doomed to failure.
April 3
New York State legalized marijuana on April Fools’ Day, but it was no cruel joke.
The cruel joke is that the puritanical and backward state of Pennsylvania, which is still holding on to archaic Prohibition Era laws that make it harder and more expensive for its citizens to buy alcohol, is expected to follow suit in 2075.
I spent a lot of my subversive newspaper career pushing for the immediate end of the federal government’s unjust and insane War on (some) Drugs. I once even got a nice thank you note from Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner.
I interviewed libertarians and anti-drug war warrior Ethan Nadelmann as often as I could. I persuaded Trib publisher Richard Scaife to come out with an editorial in favor of marijuana decriminalization in 2009 — five years before the mighty New York Times.
And in 2002, during a meeting at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I told President Bush’s overzealous Drug Czar John Walters to his face that the war on drugs was immoral, unjust and doomed to failure.
I was very proud in 2002 to see that Cannabis News reprinted the commentary I wrote for the Trib about my close — and depressing — encounter with America’s top drug cop .
Czar Wars
by Bill Steigerwald
Nov. 17, 2002
You can’t win an argument with the drug czar.
I found that out fast this month when John Walters, the federal government’s tireless, full-time propagandist in the War on Drugs, met for an edgy but civil hour of debate with Trib editors and reporters.
Czar Walters, whose official title is director of National Drug Control Policy, came to town as part of his national campaign to debunk the latest crisis of the government’s never-ending drug war — “the myth of harmless marijuana.”
Later that day, he would tell students at Highlands High School in Natrona Heights that pot is not a soft drug that deserves to be decriminalized or legalized, but a dangerous, addictive scourge that is increasingly destroying the brains and bodies of teenagers.
I’m sure Czar Walters thought he would be in friendly territory at the Trib.
But after his opening remarks, in which he summarized at great length how his office planned to carry out its presidential mandate to cut drug use in America 10 percent in two years and 25 percent in five, he quickly discovered he was behind enemy lines.
No one laughed out loud or was rude. But none of us was buying much of what the czar was selling — especially the part about how marijuana is now apparently a greater threat to the Republic than al-Qaida, Saddam Hussein or Al Sharpton combined.
Dimitri Vassilaros, my fellow lovable libertarian, and I made the standard anti-prohibitionist complaints about the heavy cost of the drug war in dollars and lost civil liberties and imprisoned nonviolent drug offenders.
But we aging journalists were no match for a five-star drug general. He is smart, competent and blessed with a likable, un-czarlike manner. After months of campaigning, he carries all the government facts, studies, anti-legalization arguments and official policy statements in his head — and his heart. To back him up, he travels with two assistants and a pile of official blue information packets stamped with "Executive Office of the President."
In the end, it didn’t matter what we serfs believed. The czar had not come to debate drug policy. He doesn’t believe debate is even possible. He thinks the government’s side — which I would argue is mindless, hysterical, absolutist, puritanical, inconsistent, cruel, totalitarian and embarrassing — is always right and the other side’s arguments have no credibility.
Walters accepts the results of no health study — no matter how new or reputable — that doesn’t find marijuana to be dangerous, addictive or a gateway to heroin and crack.
He is quick to discredit or disbelieve the recent poll results in Time magazine and elsewhere that show ever-higher majorities of Americans say marijuana should be decriminalized. I’m heartened by those polls. I’m also encouraged to see that 74 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center agree with me and my 84-year-old non-pot-smoking mother that we’re losing our 30-year War on (some) Drugs.
Like we eventually did with Vietnam and Prohibition, someday we will look back at the War on Drugs and see we had been waging a costly war that we never should have started, that was fought stupidly and did more to harm society than help it.
Czar Walters, of course, would buy none of this defeatist talk. He insisted to us that the war is going well — except, he said, that we need a few billion dollars more for treatment and for helping the Colombians fight the cartels and for beefing up interdiction by the Coast Guard.
And except that marijuana is much more powerful and is addicting more of our teens than ever.
And except that you can buy drugs in cities like Pittsburgh on the same corners they’ve been sold on for the last 30 years.
And except that high school kids have more trouble buying a pack of Winstons than a bag of pot.
We lost our argument with the czar, just as the decriminalizers and legalizers lost two days later when voters in Nevada, Arizona and Ohio rejected ballot issues to approve marijuana for medical use, decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana or put nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of jail.
Czar Walters is probably still cheering these victories. But he should celebrate while he can. The slow, steady revolution of responsible, sensible drug reform bubbling up from some of the country’s most conservative states is not going to go away.
Fewer and fewer Americans are such dopes when it comes to supporting federal drug policy, especially as it regards marijuana, a drug that polls say about half of Americans have tried and nearly 72 percent believe possession of small amounts of should be punished by fines, not jail time.
Czar Walters and his allies paint drug reformers as threats to the public health and safety, as coddlers of criminals, or as irresponsible dopers who are willing to sacrifice the future of the country’s youth for the selfish right to get high.
I’m 55 and don’t use or sell drugs. I won’t lie and say I never did – or that I don’t think my kids never will. But I see the growing drug reform movement as a sign that common sense is not completely dead in America.
I’d argue that most reform leaders and their followers are responsible citizens who are concerned about individual freedom or interested in minimizing the serious harm done to society by the prohibition of drugs that 16 million people demand and the worst elements of society are willing to supply.
But who the reform leaders are, or what their real motives for de-escalating the drug war are, is not the point.
The War on Drugs is wrong. A majority of ordinary Americans know it, even if their political leaders don't or are terrified to admit it. And the sooner our government declares defeat and ends it, the better.
We said all that, though not so clearly, to Czar Walters, who looked suspiciously relieved when his time in the Trib torture chamber was up. I didn’t set out to make him uncomfortable, and maybe we didn’t. Maybe he’s used to being argued with. I sure hope so.
When I shook his hand good-bye, I made a point of telling him something else. “Please tell the president that the War on Drugs is shameful and unbecoming a free society.”
I didn't deliver that message to be nasty or try to change his mind. I did it so he and his boss in the White House will know that the dissenters in the drug war include stone-sober grandfathers like me.