From: bwalker@polaris.unm.edu (Ben M. Walker)
Date: 9 Jun 1993 00:43:29 GMT

  This column by William F. Buckley was in The Albuquereque Journal
this morning.  It makes a good argument for marijuana legalization.
William Buckley's columns are copyright by the Universal Press
Syndicate.

Legalization of Marijuana Long Overdue

  In a recent encounter, Edward Koch reminded his interlocuter that many
years ago, Rep. Edward Koch had sought backing for a congressional 
investigation into the marijuana laws.  I had been reminded by the former
mayor of New York that along about 1967-68, the typical congressman
had to reflect that any law requiring one or five or 10 years in jail as 
a penalty for being caught using marijuana endangered his own sons
and daughters in college.  Koch got the support he sought.

  But no meaningful reforms, if that is the word we are permitted to
use, were enacted.  In 1967, all drug arrests came to 121,000.  Of these,
marijuana arrests were one-half, 61,000.  In 1991, all drug arrests
were 1 million, marijuana 285,000.

  Background data give us perspective.  Sixty-six million Americans
have smoked marijuana, and at least 10 million - perhaps many more -
continue to do so regularly.  Comparable figures?  Twenty-two million 
have used cocaine, 1.5 million still do; 150 million have used tobacco,
50 million still do.  In 1976, 12 percent of children age 12-17 had used
marijuana during the preceding month.  By 1990, this figure was down to
5 percent.  Over age 26, the percentage had not changed: 3.5 percent in
1976, 3.6 percent in 1990.

  The social vectors within the drug-law-reform movement have during the 
period since Koch asked for an investigation of federal marijuana laws
moved as follows:

  -The informed public is gradually willing to acknowledge a difference
between marijuana and more lethal drugs.

  -It is, however reluctantly, acknowledged that marijuana can have
therapeutic uses, in particular to bring relief to those suffering 
from radiation or chemotherapy treatments for cancer.

  -There is a gradual awakening of the moral sensibilities of the
alert members of the public.  My own belated arrival on the scene stings
in the memory.  It came with a letter from a father in his early 30s
who neither smoked nor drank, who had three children, was gainfully 
employed, and engaged in civic-minded activity - but liked on Saturday
nights, to retreat to his woodshed and smoke a joint.  He was caught at
it, arrested, his house seized, and is now in jail, and sentenced to
10 years.  It is hard to understand the moral disposition of the prosecuter
who asked for that sentence, and the judge who imposed it.

  The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has a 
program, which is to bring on the legalization of marijuana by the year
1997.  The president of NORML, as it is everywhere referred to, is a man
of considerable literary and polemical skills.  Richard Cowan is a 
graduate of Yale and a co-founder of Young Americans for Freedom.  He is
here and there given to hyperbole, as when he cites the support given to
the Partnership for a Drug Free America (PDFA) by corporate America as
"reminiscent of the support given the Nazis by German industrialists."

  But Cowen is on to something, the root credentials of which are:

  -However one feels about legalizing cocaine, the case for legalizing
marijuana is an entire world removed from that question.

  -The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute
hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of
marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it.
A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an inposition on 
basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.

  -The point must surely come when the American people acknowledge that
the drive against marijuana is not proving anything at all, given the 
contnuing availability of the drug and its (relatively modest) patronage.

  Richard Cowan makes a telling point, namely that the media are
notoriously insensitive to the abuses of the narcocracy.  "Most people
are unaware of the nature of the marijuana prohibition in America
today, the extent of its cruelty and injustice, and the threat that it
poses to everyone's freedom.  Ironically, many of those who are aware
of the extent of the problem view it as being so great that they despair
of being able to end it.  Consequently, as an act of triage, they
abandon it as a lost cause, to work on something which they view as
at least possible."  Like what? The rehabilitation of President Clinton?


