Mitt Romney's Strange Bedfellows In Long Drug War

Parts of this article are adapted from the book "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America."

Campaigning in New Hampshire during the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked on several occasions whether he supported medical marijuana. He became visibly frustrated.

"I have the same position this week I had last week when you asked the question," he said, before arguing fairly loosely that medical marijuana should be banned because it might lead to broader marijuana legalization, which might in turn lead pot smokers to try hard drugs.

"The entryway into our drug culture for our young people is marijuana," Romney said. "Marijuana is the starter drug. And the idea of medical marijuana is designed to help get marijuana out into the public marketplace and ultimately lead to the legalization of marijuana overall. And in my view, that's the wrong way to go."

Romney suggested his questioner approach Democrats instead and promised to fight legalization. "I know there are some on the Democratic side of the aisle that'd be happy to get in your campaign," he said. "But I'm opposed to it, and if you elect me president, you're not going to see legalized marijuana. I'm going to fight it tooth and nail."

Later in the campaign, during an interview in Colorado with a local CBS reporter, he expressed the same disdain for the question. In that swing state, medical marijuana is legal and popular. Colorado residents will vote Election Day on a constitutional amendment that would legalize it for all adults.

"Aren't there issues of significance you'd like to talk about? The economy? The growth of jobs? The need to put people back to work?" asked Romney, before adding, "I believe it's a gateway drug to other drug violations."

After the interview ended, he added as an aside to the reporter, "I'm not running on marriage and marijuana. Those are state issues."

The gateway theory has long been discredited, although pot smokers, both recreational and medical, do often encounter the drug culture. People who want coffee go to a coffee shop; beer drinkers go to bars and liquor stores. Unless they're seeking medical marijuana in states where it's legal, pot smokers go to drug dealers.

Romney's contempt for the very question might seem to make the decision on Election Day easy for voters who care foremost about pot. But while Romney has vowed to fight weed tooth and nail, President Barack Obama is already doing so, throwing the weight of the Justice Department against medical marijuana shops around the country, even though he had previously promised not to waste federal resources targeting businesses in compliance with state law.

Medical marijuana advocates have reacted with fury. "Obama promised the American people that he would lead his agencies based on science and not political ideology, and promised not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws. He has broken both promises," said Steph Sherer, head of Americans for Safe Access, the largest organization representing medical marijuana patients. "It's his administration's policy that marijuana has no medical value and is more dangerous than methamphetamines. In the first three and a half years of President Obama, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] has raided more medical marijuana facilities than in eight years of Bush."

It might seem strange for Obama, a heavy pot smoker himself in high school who has called the drug war a failure, to be prosecuting it with such vigor. But the assault is in line with a progressive American hostility toward drug use that stretches back more than a century. The same impulse -- and in many cases the same people -- that galvanized the movements to end slavery and win women the right to vote also drove the temperance movement, the forerunner of today's anti-drug crusaders.

Cracking down on drinking and drug use fits into the progressive notion that government power should be marshaled to improve society and the people within it. It also neatly aligned with New Deal Democrats' push to expand the size and scope of government during the 1930s.

Understanding the role that liberalism played in launching the drug war is critical for anyone looking to roll it back.

We could start on a Sunday, in December 1873, when around 70 women marched out of a Presbyterian church in Hillsboro, Ohio, led by the daughter of a former governor. "Walking two by two, the smaller ones in the front and the taller coming after, they sang more or less confidently, 'Give to the Winds Thy Fears,' that heartening reassurance of Divine protection now known ... as the Crusade Hymn. Every day they visited the saloons and the drug stores where liquor was sold. They prayed on sawdust floors or, being denied entrance, knelt on snowy pavements before the doorways, until almost all the sellers capitulated," writes Helen E. Tyler in Where Prayer and Purpose Meet: The WCTU Story, 1874'1949. Born out of these marches, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union became one of the most successful lobbying organizations in American history.

Over the next four decades, the group became a media sensation, grew its ranks to more than 345,000, and spearheaded the effort to transform the personal pledge of its members "to abstain from all distilled, fermented and malt liquors" into a Constitutional mandate. By 1920, per-capita consumption in the United States was only about an eighth of what it was a century before, and only about a quarter of what it is today.

The WCTU's slogan -- "For God and Home and Native Land" -- perfectly encapsulates the forces that propelled it: religion, family values, and nationalism. In the 19th-century United States, all three were ascendant. The Second Great Awakening fostered the growth of missionary societies, preaching tours, and dayslong revival meetings. New periodicals such as Godey's Lady's Book, Ladies' Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping described women's duties to their nuclear families as near-religious imperatives. The War of 1812 -- especially Andrew Jackson's drubbing of the British at the Battle of New Orleans -- gave Americans a sense of themselves as players equal to any on the world stage and unleashed a wave of patriotic fervor. If the latter ebbed a little during the Civil War, it rose again mightily with the 1876 centennial, marked in Philadelphia with an exposition of homegrown wonders that included Charles E. Hires' root beer, H.J. Heinz's ketchup, and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.

In other words, if you had a taste for Bible-thumping, homemaking, flag-waving, and teetotaling, it was an exciting time for America. Ditto if you had a taste for cocaine or opiates.

What we think of as today's major drugs almost all entered American culture in the mid-19th century, and all became hugely popular by the end of it. Key to their success was the demonization of beer, wine, and liquor by the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, and their various fellow travelers and predecessors, none of which realized something fundamental about America: that it relates to alcohol and drugs much like an addict does -- with spasms of morality and sobriety followed by relapse.

Again and again in American history, use of one substance diminishes while use of another rises, due to a combination of social, political, and economic factors. A movement against a drug might spring up organically, but it's nurtured by whatever interests it serves. The drug goes from socially acceptable to socially condemned. It often becomes illegal. Then something else takes its place.

This process was on full display in the 19th century, as the first significant surge of the temperance movement accidentally created a drug lover's utopia.