|
Barack Obama is certainly not the first presidential candidate to admit he inhaled marijuana, but he is the first to admit using cocaine. The Democratic senator from Illinois experimented with drugs during his high school years in Hawaii in the '70s and as a college student at Occidental College and Columbia University. He also experienced the drug war firsthand when a friend of his was busted for weed. How will this influence Obama's platform on illegal drugs?
Obama wrote about these experiences in his first book, Dreams from My Father, in 1995. Here's an excerpt from the book:
"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though - Mickey, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that. Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking like a faulty engine when he said it...
"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed; the final fatal role of the would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind. Something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.
"I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in a white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids... You just might be bored or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection.
"And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. That's how it seemed to me then, anyway."
He then relates the story of Pablo, who didn't have "his driver's licence that day [when] a cop with nothing better to do check[ed] the trunk of his car... One day [my mother] marched into my room wanting to know the details of Pablo's arrest. I told her not to worry, I wouldn't do anything that stupid.
"'Don't you think you're being a little casual about your future?' she said. 'One of your friends just got arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping..."
"I didn't want to hear about this..."
Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn's "Five reasons why the cocaine story is good for Obama."
Pic: Barack Obama'a high-school yearbook photo, 1979
 |
