Lennon smoked too

The War on Drugs was still just a twinkle in Richard M. Nixon's evil eye when the great John Lennon released his classic recording called "Imagine." That was in 1971, and Nixon launched his horribly misconceived attack on recreational drug users the following year as part of the re-election campaign headed by the aptly named Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP).

My fantasy of late has been to imagine an America without a War on Drugs — a place where the cynical, old, rich, white men who dominated the United States Senate, and their feral sidekicks in the House of Representatives, had never succeeded in hoodwinking the public into welcoming their rhetoric about the dangers of getting high and the sick, draconian measures they enacted to interdict and punish the millions of recreational drug users among our citizenry.

Forty unrelenting years of this inhuman campaign founded in a passel of lies, untruths and severe misrepresentations has transformed our country from a flawed but still idealistic democracy to an ever-burgeoning police state with a gigantic, self-perpetuating, taxpayer-funded apparatus of persecution and doom directed at everyone who refuses to accept the vicious anti-drug mythology that's been enacted into law.

Let's imagine that the White House and the federal legislative bodies had simply rejected the specious argument advanced by empire-building bureaucrats like Harry J. Anslinger that marijuana was a narcotic with no conceivable medical application and its users presented a clear and present danger to the social order.

What if, instead, they had conducted an unfettered scientific investigation into the actual properties, patterns and methods of usage, physical and mental effects, documented medicinal uses, economic potential, and overall impact of marijuana on the fabric of American society, resulting in the reasonable conclusion that cannabis causes virtually no harm to its users nor to society in general.

With respect to other recreational drugs with certain detrimental effects on their users, the relatively enlightened lawmakers might well have concluded that the resultant problems were likely medical and/or psychological in nature and demanded treatment of some sort to reduce the potentially negative impact on the drug users and, by extension, on the social order itself.

Nowhere would such an informed approach dictate legal sanctions against recreational drug users of any sort. If their behavior were to cause problems in the workplace or in social settings, the usual remedies — demotion, firing, suspension from duties and the like — would be applied to resolve any discrepancies. If laws were broken as a result of their drug use, the mandated responses — arrest, prosecution, conviction, punishment — would be effected as for all similar violators.

The idea of segregating recreational drug users from their fellow citizens as a class unto themselves and punishing them for getting high in their chosen ways would be seen as indefensibly stupid and entirely without basis under our system of jurisprudence and its guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — like arresting and jailing persons for smoking a cigarette or drinking a bottle (or even an entire case) of beer.

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