What happens across the kitchen table has a far greater influence on whether American adolescents smoke pot or snort cocaine than what happens across the Mexican border. America’s best hope for a drug-free society is in the kitchen, the living room, the classroom and the church pew, not in the
Joseph A. Califano Jr.
Joseph A. Califano Jr. is founder and chair of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
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The Myths of Drug Legalization: From March 16, 1996
When high priests of America’s political right and left as articulate as William F. Buckley Jr., founding editor of National Review, and Anthony Lewis, a columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed page, peddle the same drug legalization line, it’s time to shout caveat emptor–let the buyer beware. For the boomlet to legalize drugs like heroin, cocaine and marijuana that they–and magazines like National Review and New York–are trying to seed among the right and left ends of the political spectrum, is founded in fiction, not fact. And it’s our children who could suffer long-lasting, permanent damage.