Fresh Ideas for a Tired Crusade

The New York Times
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April 1, 2008
Contributing Columnist
Fresh Ideas for a Tired Crusade
By TIMOTHY EGAN
SEATTLE
The travel writer and public television host, Rick Steves, is a certain kind of innocent abroad — benignly suburban to the core, with a bit of a paunch and the ever-quizzical look of someone who would try raw squid for breakfast and not complain about it.
At 52, he has spent a third of his adult life living out of a suitcase, ever in search of that bargain room with a view, encouraging his fellow Americans to become “temporary locals.” His influence is vast and one of the reasons our citizens aren’t more hated abroad in Bush’s final days.
I was having lunch once in Vernazza, in the Italian Cinque Terre, watching waves of people pour into the tiny village to look for their serendipitous Stevesian encounter while clutching his guidebook. A sudden outburst came from my 7-year-old son: “Rick Steves has got to be stopped!”
Steves, who lives just north of Seattle, is packing his wrinkle-free clothes for his latest expedition to Europe. One can only hope customs will let him back in, for Steves has become a most unlikely voice on behalf of ending the tragedy of the drug war.
He looks at the 800,000 Americans arrested every year on marijuana charges and wonders why the waste of time, money and lives. Year after year, nothing changes, except the faces of those in jail. He thinks marijuana should be decriminalized, and that drug use in general should be treated primarily as a health issue — as the Canadians, the British, the Swiss and others do.
His views are not novel. But it’s been fascinating to watch the reaction since Steves started speaking out on this. Sponsors of his television shows have hardly blinked. Cops and conservatives have told him how much they agree with him. And, less than a month ago, the Luther Institute gave Steves its annual Wittenberg Award, recognizing “outstanding service to church and society.” Steves is an active member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
If it takes a churchgoing guidebook writer who spent his college years as a member of the marching band to call for an end to a tired war, so be it. The cheerleaders and architects of harsh drug laws — from Rush Limbaugh, who promised to take random drugs tests after admitting his addiction to pain pills, to the former drug czar Bill Bennett, who had a multimillion-dollar gambling habit — have been exposed as moral frauds.
Two of the major presidential candidates are in a unique position to pivot away from the status quo.
It’s been largely forgotten, but Cindy McCain, the wife of the presumptive Republican nominee, was once so hooked on the opioid painkillers Percocet and Vicodin that she resorted to stealing from a medical charity she ran.
And Barack Obama in his 1995 memoir, told of youthful alcohol and pot use, “maybe even a little blow when I could afford it.” He wrote this cautionary note: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.”

READ THE REST OF THE OP-ED HERE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/opinion/01egan.html?hp