Politicians' Drugs, in Order of Acceptability: Cocktails, Cannabis, Cocaine

Our three most recent
presidents all admitted (some more forthrightly than others) that
they had tried marijuana, and
survey data suggest that something like half of all politicians
(assuming they resemble the general population in this respect)
have done so as well. But how do Americans feel about politicians
for whom pot smoking is an ongoing pastime rather than a youthful
indiscretion?

According to the latest

Reason-Rupe Public Opinion Survey, most would not mind if they
learned that a public official unwinds with a few puffs of cannabis
in his spare time instead of a cocktail or two. Fifty-two percent
of respondents said they would “still support” such a politician.
Forty-three percent said they would not, however, and I suspect
that is a lot higher than the percentage who would reject a
candidate based on his after-work tippling.

Although some recent polls find
majority support for legalizing marijuana, many Americans
evidently still believe alcohol is morally superior. Their numbers
seem to be shrinking, however. In a 2006 Pew Research Center
survey, 50
percent of respondents said smoking pot is “morally wrong,”
compared to 45 percent who said it was either “morally acceptable”
or “not a moral issue.” This year Pew found those numbers
had shifted substantially: Only 32 percent deemed marijuana
consumption “morally wrong,” while 62 percent did not find it
morally troubling. Still, if you take the third or so who deem
marijuana morally objectionable and add people who believe it is
wrong for public officials to break the law (even when the law is
irrational or unjust), you can see how two-fifths of Americans
might abandon a pot-smoking politician.  

As you might expect, younger
people are more accepting of a politician’s marijuana use: In the
Reason-Rupe
survey, 65 percent of respondents younger than 35 said it was
no big deal, compared to 50 percent of 35-to-54-year-olds and 44
percent of respondents 55 or older. That pattern is similar to the
age trend in support for legalizing marijuana, which was 49 percent
overall in this poll but 56 percent in the under-35 group.

A cannabis-consuming candidate is in a much more favorable
position than one who favors cocaine. A whopping 85 percent of
respondents said they would “no longer support” a public official
who “uses cocaine occasionally in his or her personal time.” The
gap between cocaine and cannabis on this score reflects cocaine’s
scarier reputation, which is reinforced by the fact that the number
of Americans who have tried it is about one-third the number who
have tried marijuana, based on data from the
National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Once you allow for a
bit of underreporting (which is likely in a survey asking about
illegal behavior), it looks like most American adults born after
World War II have smoked (or eaten) cannabis at some point. But
even if you assume that an equal percentage of cocaine users lie in
surveys, this drug is still distinctly a minority taste. People
tend to view relatively exotic intoxicants as
more frightening (and more condemnable) than familiar ones.

That tendency was not lost on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and U.S.
Rep. Trey Radel (R-Fla.), both of whom
blamed their occasional cocaine use on their heavy drinking,
figuring the public would be more inclined to forgive the latter
than the former. An interesting question, given evolving public
opinion, is how those scandals would have played out if the illegal
drug had been marijuana rather than cocaine. Growing public support
for legalizing marijuana seems to go hand
in hand with growing understanding of marijuana’s health and
safety advantages over alcohol, although a stubborn (and aging)
minority
refuses even to consider the comparison. Would Ford or Radel
have tried to offer excessive alcohol consumption as an excuse for
consuming marijuana from time to time, or would they have worried
that voters might prefer an occasional pot smoker to a habitual
drunk?