I have long been in favor of making any and all recreational drug use completely legal, but I’m not going to rehash those arguments here. They’ve been made countless times before by people with much better knowledge of the relevant information than me. (Paul Campos, up at Lawyers, Guns & Money, wrote a terrific (and short) piece in that vein just after the election.) Instead, I’m going to point out one simple fact and call it a day.
Barack Obama will be the third consecutive President of the United States of America who has admitted to illegal drug use; and the second to have that use include cocaine.
That’s all you need to know. All three of our post-WWII generation presidents have used illegal drugs. I’m going to repeat that because it’s very important and almost never remarked upon. The three men who’ve most recently won the highest, most respected office in America (four if you want to count Gore in 2000) have all used illegal drugs recreationally.
These men represent both political parties and each of them was, at the time, guilty of a crime which at this very moment has literally hundreds of thousands of Americans incarcerated. Each of them was fortunate enough not to get caught, as the vast majority of drug users are, but all of them broke the law in a way that could’ve sent them to prison, potentially for years.
Tomorrow is Christmas, but whether you celebrate it or a different (less commercially significant) end of year holiday doesn’t really matter. We refer to this part of the calendar as “The Holidays” because there are a lot of them, enough to cover pretty much everyone in this country. And hundreds of thousands of Americans will be spending them in prison, deprived of their liberty and away from their friends and family, because they committed the same victimless, non-violent crime as our last three presidents.
Casual, recreational drug use is an accepted part of our culture and has been for three generations. By the end of Obama’s first term the highest office in the land will have been held exclusively by drug users for twenty straight years. It might be time to take a fresh look at the prohibition of recreational drug use.
