After my brief post yesterday on a story in the Strib on Wendy Wilde, particularly her weasely response to questions about her previous remarks on smoking marijuana, I received a number of e-mails asking for further details.
Here is the original 2002 forum post by Wilde:
We visited several European nations last summer and were impressed while biking around Haarlem, Netherlands, to talk to residents and find that marijuana coffee shops are low-key places with no smarmy, rowdy, dangerous characters as U.S. anti-drug proponents might want you to think (whereas bars in the U.S. are often rowdy places where fights and other dangers lurk). I did smoke... it is not illegal there... and while I could care less about getting high (I also don't care to get drunk), I can't see any reason to make marijuana illegal when booze here is okay??? How confusing. I don't understand why we in the U.S. are actually CREATING a crime underworld for ourselves by making something so inane illegal.
That should clear up any confusion about her "not remembering" whether she smoked or not. Clearly she did.
Later in the same post, she unveiled a couple of her pet theories on why marijuana is illegal:
I have a theory: When the cold war ended, they didn't know what to do with all those highly trained agents... so President Reagan invented a "War on Drugs" to give the agents jobs and keep that part of the military-industrial economy going. How many billions of dollars have we spent in the past 20 years... and the drug use rates in the United States have not dropped even a sliver. In 1980 roughly 10% of Americans said they used drugs... and in 2000 the numbers are basically the same (I believe it is actually a tiny fraction higher, now)!
Theory II: I really believe that marijuana is illegal in the U.S. because it is a natural, easily grown weed that the big drug companies cannot patent. If marijuana was decriminalized, anyone could grow it cheaply in their back yard and the big guys who profit from selling designer (prescription) drugs to stressed out Americans couldn't make any money off it... and might even cost them money because people would use a backyard plant instead of an expensive prescription to help them relax a little.
Interesting theories. There is a little problem with the timeline for number one since Reagan's War On Drugs was declared in 1982 and the Cold War really didn't end until 1991. Minor details I suppose.
Wilde went on to speculate that marijuana use may actually make the roads safer:
Same laws should apply to marijuana as apply to booze... minimum age, no 'open containers" ... oh... and a new study out of Britain a couple months ago showed that people who smoke marijuana and drive actually were BETTER drivers! The authors of the study said they were stunned and did not expect such results. They theorized that the marijuana relaxed people so there was less tendency for stress and road rage!
And you want to be my Congresswoman?
Those who would dismiss Wilde's positions on pot as "ancient history" would do well to remember that this forum post is less than four years old. It wasn't as if Wilde was a naïve college student at the time. She was a mature, middle-aged woman of the world with plenty of life experience and a couple of kids to boot.
Is this really the mom you want cleaning house in the Congress?
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