Original publication: November 1998.
TAKING THE HIGH ROAD
Frankly, we don’t give a damn about the President’s sex life. What we do care about is that during President Clinton’s time in office, marijuana busts have almost doubled. A new federal prison opens almost every month, as the river of convicted pot-growers and low-level crack dealers overflows the old facilities. He routinely parrots the myth about today’s pot containing “three times the poison” of the ‘60s stuff he claims to have not inhaled.
Nearly three decades ago Clinton became friendly with a bunch of potheads while attending England’s prestigious Oxford University. One of them, Sara Maitland, hosted weekly “tea parties.” In David Maraniss’ First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (Simon & Schuster. 1995). she describes the drugs floating around Oxford at the time: “Nothing beyond dope [pot], nobody using acid. Somebody may have tried mescaline. Some pot and hash in the evenings.”
One of Maitland’s friends, Martin Walker, recalls that hash was more available than grass. “We would scramble it into tobacco cigarettes,” he explains. “We’d take out the tobacco from a standard English cigarette, hold a match up to a lump of hashish, put it in and smoke that.”
Clinton attended many of these parties. Not a tobacco smoker, he had great difficulty downing the tobacco-hash mixture. “We spent enormous amounts of time trying to teach him to inhale.” Maitland says. “He absolutely could not inhale.”
After smoking, Clinton would stick his head out the window and gasp for air.
“He was technically correct,” Walker concludes, “to say that he did not inhale.” Whether or not this is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the fact is that dozens of our current elected representatives have smoked marijuana sometime during their baby-boomer lives. HT’s Robert Bowker did some digging and filed his findings in “Did You Inhale?”.
Even more revealing is Steve Gelsi’s epic about jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s lifelong devotion to marijuana. Jazz was the soundtrack to the beginnings of 20th-century counterculture. Black Americans found pleasure and dignity in its funky sophistication, grace under oppression and use of individual expression to create communal ecstasy. Whites like Mezz Mezzrow and Jack Kerouac were envious and inspired.
So was Bill Clinton, who has been known to pick up his sax and blow on special occasions. Perhaps the President would like to join us when we induct Armstrong and Mezzrow into the Cannabis Hall of Fame at the 11th Annual Cannabis Cup this month in Amsterdam.
Of course, he would first have to admit that he inhaled.
