John never expected Tom to take them up on it, but he drained his beer and said, “Sure. Follow me and watch. You see my brake lights once, you guys can have the car.” Truth was, nobody wanted that pint-size rust bucket, but after checking to make sure the brake lights worked, everybody piled into their cars to follow. Everyone except John. He got in beside Tom. No discussion. It was understood, expected.
Off they went. John still got shaky when he remembered that ride. The first light was green, and that had been fine. But the next three turned red as Tom approached. He never slowed. Playing the manual gear shift like a Stradivarius, he passed stopped cars ahead of him on the left or swung onto the shoulder and shot by. But never once did he hit the brake pedal. Ran three red lights, and each time he flashed through an intersection his face wore the same expression it did now, with that same jutting jaw.
And he seemed to be demanding that same kind of loyalty now. But John couldn’t quite bring himself to slip into the passenger seat on this trip.
“Why, Tom?” John said. “It’s not only bad policy, it’s bad politics. Even your own party—”
“Will eventually come around.” He ground a fist into his palm. “The ones that really irk me are the budget cutters. They wail about federal spending? Well, I’m giving them something real to cut: sixty billion a year. Every year. For what? Drugs are more available on the street now than they’ve ever been. Sixty billion, Johnny. The truth is, I want that money. I’ve got better places to spend it.”
“But the social cost…”
“How can the social cost be higher than what we’re paying now? You mentioned buying heroin at the corner drugstore. You can do that now, John—on the corner outside the drugstore. Legalization is not going to change availability—drugs are everywhere now! And you talk about social cost? What about every sociopath in the world fighting for a piece of the profits?”
“My point exactly,” John said. “Why become the enemy?”
“Aw, Johnny,” he said. “Don’t look at it that way. There’s so damn much money in drugs that the cartels have been able to corrupt entire police forces, buy entire town governments… towns with airports. It’s mind boggling and stomach turning. And the worst of it is, they can make those kinds of profits for one reason and one reason alone: We’ve declared their commodity illegal. If we legalized it, we could even start taxing the profits on the legal sale of those same drugs. I see a net gain of seventy or eighty billion dollars.”
“All of it dirty money,” John said.
“No dirtier than taxes we take from tobacco and alcohol. It’s money we can put toward educating people to stay away from drugs, and rehabbing those who are already hooked.”
“Come on, Tom. Do you really want to collect taxes on crack? I mean, don’t we have enough crack heads and crack babies already?”
“Crack wouldn’t even exist if cocaine were legal. It’s just like the hundred-ninety-proof industrial-grade alcohol of the Roaring Twenties. People bought it to spike their drinks. It had a huge market—which disappeared overnight when Scotch, beer, and wine became legal again. The same will happen to crack when you can buy cocaine powder, cocaine drinks—where do you think the ‘Coca’ in Coca-Cola came from?—even cocaine chewing gum.”
“Cocaine chewing gum—Christ!”
“So I’ll give in on crack. But what I—” The phone rang. Tom picked it up, listened for a few seconds, said, “Thanks,” then hung up. He started for the door, motioning John after him. “In here.” He followed Tom into the presidential living quarters where a giant rear projection TV was already on. John had been here two or three times for drinks and dinner.
Tom grabbed the remote and switched to Today. An elderly, balding man with thick, horn-rimmed glasses was speaking to the camera. The screen tag read MILTON FRIEDMAN.
“Friedman?” John said. “The economist? Wasn’t he—?” The screen answered his question by adding FORMER ADVISOR TO PRESIDENT REAGAN.
Bryant Gumbel asked him what sort of America he envisioned after the decriminalization of drugs, and the professor said he saw an America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there was a chance for poor people to live without being afraid for their lives…
Professor Friedman fielded several more questions, each answer stressing the propriety—for economic as well as philosophical reasons—of legalizing drugs.
As the station cut to a commercial, Tom hit the mute and turned to him.
“That’s why I’m going to win. My staff has been talking to the mass media for weeks. The networks, the major magazines, and newspaper chains are ready to support me on this.”
“They sure didn’t sound that way as I was driving down here.”
“Oh? You’ll notice that they all carried my address in toto. They’ll start off with subtle support. Like Milton Friedman there. He’s opposed antidrug laws from the gitgo. When he was with Reagan, he pushed for it. But the millions who saw him just now don’t know that. They heard him say drugs should be legalized and they saw ‘Former Advisor to President Reagan.” He mimicked a viewer: “ ’Reagan? Really? Hmmm… ‘ Believe me, none of that was accidental. You’ll see a lot of Friedman in the coming months. William F. Buckley will be out there too. And—”
“Buckley?” John couldn’t believe it. “You and William F . Buckley on the same side?”
“He’s favored decriminalization for years, and hasn’t been shy about saying so. We’ll have senior judges from all over the country who are refusing to hear drug cases because they think the laws are unfair…”
“If you think that’s going to make any difference…”
“Every night, every day, every random act of violence, every drive-by shooting, every overdose, every single crime that can be blamed on the huge, unconscionable profits from illegal drugs—and believe me, those points will be punched home—will be dragged before the viewing public. So will all the statistics that certify the War on Drugs as unwinnable. The facts are on my side, John.”
“But the people aren’t.”
“They will be. They’ll see that there’ll always be a sizable segmen of humanity that wants drugs and will find ways to get them. We have millions of them in this country—twelve million occasional marijuana users alone. They’re here and they’re not going away. Passing laws won’t change them. And we sure as hell can’t lock up all of them.”
“I can’t see the average American citizen surrendering to the druggies.”
“Changing tactics is not surrender. Look, we have millions of Americans who want to dose themselves with various chemicals. Mostly they’re only hurting themselves, and if they happen to hurt somebody else while under the influence, we already have laws on the books for people who do damage while intoxicated. Let’s deal with them as people with a hang-up, not criminals.” Tom radiated sincerity and conviction. He was a mesmerizing speaker and a master of mass media. And he truly believed.
“You know,” John said slowly, “you just might bring this off.”
“I am going to bring this off. I may not get complete legalization, but I know I can get marijuana decriminalized. That’s a foot in the door. And once that door is open, it’s just a matter of time.” John was beginning to believe him.