MarijuanaNews.com : Exclusive To MarijuanaNews: Interview With William F. Buckley, Jr. By Noah Pollak and Dan Mindus

Posted January 24, 2000
See

href=”http://marijuananews.com/marijuananews/cowan/buckley_writes_on_mcwilliams_and.htm”>Buckley
Writes On McWilliams And Kubby Cases; Great Ending, If I May Say So.

(MarijuanaNews note: This is an except of a longer interview that will be published soon
in Restoration Magazine. I am grateful to my friend Noah Pollak for the
opportunity to use the parts relevant to the readers of MarijuanaNews.)

By Noah Pollak and Dan Mindus
From Restoration Magazine
href=”http://www.restorationmag.com”>http://www.restorationmag.com

RESTORATION: A couple of questions about the drug war, which
is something you’re famous for. What do you think are the core principles that separate
you from people like James Q. Wilson and William Bennett, who are very adamantly in favor
of the drug war?

BUCKLEY: Well, it’s a utilitarian question. It’s not a philosophic question.
James Q. Wilson wrote a very, very long piece on the Drug War, and I remember how upset
Milton Friedman was when we talked about it.

RESTORATION: It wasn’t a very good article.

BUCKLEY: No it wasn’t, it really wasn’t, it wasn’t very persuasive. When I came
out in favor of drugs, I made it very, very clear that I was making a purely utilitarian
point–that if, as I think I then put it, I had a lever that I could pull and make all the
drugs disappear from the face of the earth (with the partial exception of some good wine
from France), I’d pull it. Milton is propelled primarily by, if you want to do it, that’s
your right. I’m moved by the fact that if you want to do it, I’m going to let you do it,
because in my judgment fewer people are hurt than if I try to prevent you.

RESTORATION: So are you saying that the Wilson-Bennett people are motivated by a more
abstract moral belief–that people should be prohibited from drug-taking because it
teaches them the virtue of sobriety and self-restraint?

BUCKLEY: Their argument is that taking drugs does damage, and the notion that it doesn’t
matter if you damage yourself is a kind of abstraction that simply doesn’t work in a
society in which there is so much inter-involvement. You can’t really just hurt yourself.
Correlative damage is done and under the circumstances it becomes a social right to
discourage certain kinds of activity, and [they believe drug use] qualifies under that
proscription.

RESTORATION: People like Bennett are motivated by a desire to prevent any image from the
government that the government is not involved in the wholesale condemnation of drug use.

BUCKLEY: I think if he were here he would deny it; however, I think it’s true.
I’ve had a hundred experiences on the road in which palpably that’s what people hear. If
you permit it, that means you okay it; you are not in favor of adultery because you permit
it, or of sodomy because you permit it–but I think that political mix is so fixed in the
public psychology, it’s almost impossible to combat. That brave
governor of New Mexico [Gary Johnson] is making some effort.

RESTORATION: Unfortunately that brave governor isn’t running for reelection.

BUCKLEY: I know, I know [laughs] and the guy who wants to run for governor is on the other
side.

RESTORATION: In the final line of an essay titled
“The Perils of Thinking Out Loud about Pot”, you very offhandedly referenced
“the idiots who smoke pot.” Now why do you think pot smokers are idiots?

BUCKLEY: Well, you know the Greek word idiot means “ignorant”—not
necessarily perverse. I think that any psychotropic drug should be avoided. Since I wrote
that I’ve been persuaded by a fair amount of evidence that probably there are situations
in which people who use pot can do so intelligently, and so I wouldn’t use the word
“idiot” now.

RESTORATION: Conservatives make the argument that marijuana
should be outlawed because of the culture associated with its use. Irving Kristol:
“What counts is the meaning and moral status of the action, not its physiological
dimensions…today drug taking has become a mass habit–among our young masses
especially–whose purpose is to secede from our society and our civilization; and such a
declaration requires a moral answer, not a medicinal one.”

BUCKLEY: I’d reject it, but I think it’s persuasive. James Burnham said, Look, alcohol is
our cultural drug, and under the circumstances it has historically been excluded from the
general proscriptive approach to drugs–we don’t want a second drug.
COLOR=”#ff0000″> (MarijuanaNews note: Burnham was an editor of
Buckley’s National Review for many years. He was a former communist who had a rather
dim view of human nature.) Kristol’s making the
point that when defiance is intended, it should be accepted as such. A lot of people
during the 60s were taking drugs because they wanted to drop out, and that kind of a
solipsism generates counter pressure of a kind Kristol’s talking about.

RESTORATION: Let me read you something you wrote in Execution Eve. “In the past four
or five years, millions of middle Americans suddenly found out that marijuana was
something with which their own children were experimenting…dozens of middle Americans
began to discover that the people they were in favor of sending to jail included, by
theoretical extension, their own sons.” How does that apply to your own experiences
and your own views?

BUCKLEY: What I should say is that although smoking marijuana was a defiant
gesture by many people who did it, it became so universally used, it was used then by
people who didn’t understand themselves to be engaged in a cultural revolution or sort of
Woodstockery. But I don’t think that is Kristol’s point, because he was talking about the
people who were advocating marijuana as sort of a solipsistic gesture. But when I wrote
that other business, this was after my experience with Ed Koch when he told me that a bill
that he had sponsored to commission an investigation into marijuana—

RESTORATION: The Shafer Commission.

BUCKLEY: Yes, he could only find a half-dozen sponsors, and then along around 1964-65 he
got about 250 sponsors because everybody found out that their own children were using it.

RESTORATION: You’d think you could use the conservative argument to defeat their own
position. They’re saying that we should tether whether a drug should be illegal to the
milieu in which it is used–how people use it, the ethics of those who use it. And now,
pot is ubiquitous in universities, and users aren’t doing it to separate themselves from
society.

BUCKLEY: You’re saying that now that it’s become so widely used, it’s to be separated from
the idea of a cultural provocation.

RESTORATION: Yes, if prohibition is premised on the idea that drugs that are
used by people who are interested in separating themselves from society should be
prohibited, it would stand to reason that once the drug is no longer being used, or the
ethics surrounding the drug are no longer countercultural, the prohibition should be
removed.

BUCKLEY: I think that’s totally persuasive. The idea of marijuana as
a gateway drug I don’t think is borne out by statistics. That’s like saying that everybody
who is guilty of rape once masturbated. There’s no etiology that links marijuana with
heroin.

RESTORATION: They have great correlation, but no causation.

BUCKLEY: That’s right. Probably nobody who’s used heroin has not used
marijuana. The post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy
applies there.
(MarijuanaNews note: After that, therefore because of
that. Buckley once made a great pun, post pot ergo propter pot.)

RESTORATION: Do you think an argument like Kristol’s would lead necessarily to the
breakdown in the rule of law? If the government can, on an ad hoc basis, ban anything that
it believes at the moment is involved in a countercultural or subversive movement, then
the government has full reign to make millions of formerly law-abiding people outlaws at
the stroke of a pen.

BUCKLEY: There are constitutional limitations, and those constitutional limitations I
think should be observed, though a fanatical application of them is incorrect. Society has
a sovereign right to protect itself. This is a point made by Lincoln, that the
constitution always poses the question: Are people to be allowed to the point where the
defense of freedom becomes impossible, or is there a point ahead of that? Now, he was
rather grandiose in his exemption, repealing habeas corpus, for instance. But
still, I think the point is philosophically good.

RESTORATION: One final question in regard to drugs, if you don’t mind my
asking. Have you ever done any drugs that are banned in America?

BUCKLEY: Yes I have. That question was asked of me–I was on the Johnny Carson show, and
David Suskind asked me that. Where I had it was on my boat outside of American
jurisdiction. He said, well, how’d you get it on your boat? And I said,
“parthenogenesis.” Carson thought that was so funny. I was off Nassau and it was
a bad trip because the other two guys on my boat–we all took it jointly–and they just
laughed, everything they thought was just hilarious. I just got sleepy. Maybe you have to
get more used to it. My son’s used it a lot, in days gone by.
(MarijuanaNews note: Buckley’s son, Christopher, was a
bit of a rebel in his younger days. Now he is an incredibly talented writer, so his
marijuana use apparently did no damage.)