Wednesday night, two men who everybody knows spent portions of their youth toking deeply on large spliffs -- Al Gore has essentially admitted it; George W. Bush will only say he's been drug-free since his late 20s, and won't talk about the years before that -- are appearing in front of the American people and asking to be elected president. If the subject of drugs comes up -- and unbelievably, it rarely does along the campaign trail -- hardliner Bush will call for offenders to be drawn and quartered, while bleeding-heart Gore will propose that they be impaled on sharpened spikes.

And as they speak, we will all pretend a lot of things.

We will pretend not to notice that talking about "drugs" without distinguishing between different kinds of drugs, or between using drugs and selling them, is as absurd as lumping jaywalkers and rapists together.

We will pretend that getting high, which every culture in the history of mankind has done, is a dreadful, shameful sin that can only be expiated by conversion to Christianity or some similar cataclysmic, prior-life-erasing act.

We will pretend that the official propaganda that marijuana is a "gateway" drug leading inexorably to hard drug use is an argument worthy of serious consideration and not a cartoon out of the "Reefer Madness" era.

We will pretend that we don't either know or strongly suspect that most of our co-workers and friends have smoked or still smoke dope, with no apparent ill effects (except for that one high-ranking exec's tendency to start babbling about the novel he's going to write).

We will pretend that there is nothing hypocritical about two former recreational drug users -- who somehow miraculously emerged unscathed from the billowing clouds of smoke and Jim Beam fumes to vie for the most powerful office in the world -- who refuse to talk honestly about the issue.

And when we're done with all this pretending, we'll get the taste out of our mouths with a couple of martinis. Or a joint.

America's marijuana hypocrisy is not the biggest issue facing the country, not by a long shot. But it just may be the most irritating. It's the flag-draped elephant in the room, the glaring absurdity that dare not be questioned lest one be tarred as a dazed and confused corrupter of youth. Being forced to walk past this big, tail-swinging, peanut-crunching mountain of moralizing idiocy is maddening, but our hysterical primitivism about drugs has more serious consequences.

The war on drugs has resulted in an incarceration rate so obscene that almost 1 in 4 of every person behind bars in the entire world is locked up in the United States. At this very moment, American jails and prisons hold tens of thousands of people -- vastly disproportionate numbers of them black -- whose only crime is possession of marijuana. (According to Bureau of Justice statistics, in 1997 -- the most recent year for which statistics are available -- 8,582 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons for possession of marijuana. Many more, of course, are imprisoned in local jails.)

The drug war degrades respect for authority. It leads to cynicism and apathy. And, of course, it blights thousands of lives. In 1998, over 600,000 Americans were arrested for simple possession of marijuana: They were handcuffed, read their rights, booked. Comparatively few of these people were actually sentenced to prison terms, but the damage was done. There are 600,000 Americans who feel just that much further outside civil society than they did before -- and needlessly so.

Our ostrich-like stance on this subject was highlighted last week by the great Marijuana Debacle that befell the British Conservative Party. Tory shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe, trying to seize the moralistic high ground so beloved by right-wingers on both sides of the pond, proposed that possession of even the smallest amounts of cannabis be punished by a mandatory 100-pound fine. For a few days everything went swimmingly -- until one Tory shadow cabinet minister after the next came forward to say that well, maybe the law wouldn't be such a good idea because, actually, they themselves had smoked marijuana.

The final blow was when Tory agriculture spokesman Tim Yeo said that not only had he smoked marijuana, he liked it -- the first time that a politician has ever dared to state this shocking fact, which flies in the face of everything we know about the crazed, subhuman addicts who are in the thrall of the killer weed. Widdecombe and Tory leader William Hague had to beat an extremely undignified retreat, and a national debate has begun about marijuana laws in the U.K.

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