By contrast, try to imagine Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, William Bennett and their ilk all coming forward and admitting that they'd smoked dope in their 20s, and that maybe our draconian drug laws could use a reappraisal. It's inconceivable: The Big Lie foisted by anti-drug propaganda, which paints all drug users as criminal and degraded and which American journalists have been too cowardly to challenge, is so mutely accepted that it would take a politician of rare courage to stand up and say that the emperor -- or the czar -- has no clothes.

So in terms of humaneness and honesty about drugs we're humiliatingly behind England -- and England has the harshest marijuana laws in all of Europe! Spain, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Greece and most of the other European countries have essentially decriminalized marijuana use, or given it the lowest law-enforcement priority. There are many excellent legacies of our Puritan past -- the hormone-injected turkeys that grace our Thanksgiving tables; workaholic tendencies that allow us to buy vast, chrome-bedecked SUVs -- but our ludicrous insistence that pounding four Maker's Mark Manhattans is somehow better for the individual and society than taking a few puffs on the pipe of peace is not one of them.

When word came down that George W. Bush, former party-hearty boy whose greatest and indeed sole asset as a candidate was his supposed "likability," was going to be the GOP candidate, one could be forgiven for fondly hoping that he might somehow pull a Nixon-in-China on the drug issue. No triangulating Democrat, of course, could ever go up against the drug orthodoxy. Poor wimpy Clinton was so traumatized by the subject that all that smoke he sucked into his lungs back in his longhair days suddenly vanished, leaving him clear-headed, rational and ready to jump the bones of the first intern to present her thong in the Oval Office. And Gore, fearing that he'd be painted by the right as even more of a decadent, Hollywood-loving menace than he already has been, won't make a peep. But Bush, one might have thought, just might be able to do it.

Of course, Bush's own carefully-phrased non-denials of illegal drug use made it hard for him to move on the subject. But the real reason is his complete moral obliviousness, the cavalier, smirking negligence about anything fundamentally serious that Bush and his all-too-familiar ilk wear like a badge of honor. These qualities, which large numbers of male voters apparently find make him more "fun" than Gore the Stiff, make it impossible for him to connect his own experiences with those of the thousands of mostly poor, often black or Latino Texans languishing in his state's singularly harsh and backward penal system. (The outrage in Tulia, where the black population was decimated by a drug sting operation, is just an extreme manifestation of the holy Drug War, Texas-style.)

Far from being troubled by any moral inconsistency, Bush breezily attacks Clinton and Gore -- who, good triangulators that they are, have tilted heavily towards interdiction and punishment and away from treatment -- for not being harsh enough on drugs. It's too bad some kind of time-warp punishment isn't available, in which the middle-aged Bush could travel back in time and personally flog his younger self with a cat o' nine tails for the moral edification of us all.

Of course drugs, even the relatively innocuous marijuana, aren't harmless. They do cause social problems. But our current hysterical and heavy-handed rhetoric and solutions aren't working -- and our leaders' refusal to even talk about alternatives reflects badly not just on them, but on our national maturity. It's time to grow up, accept that drug use will always be with us, treat responsible recreational drug users more or less the same way we treat recreational drinkers and start talking about ways to minimize the negative impact of drug abuse on the individual and society. Whether the solution is legalization, European-style decriminalization, discretionary sentencing or something else remains to be worked out. But until America starts confronting reality on this issue, we will continue to be the embarrassing teenager on the block.

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