Does it bother you that the most powerful man on the planet was a longtime drug user? Does it bother you that he has attempted to use his drug abuse to gain credibility with young Americans? Does it bother you that his acknowledgment of having been a serious drug user has been given a pass in the news media?

America's Historic Cokehead President

By Daren Jonescu

 

Does it bother you that the most powerful man on the planet was a longtime drug user?  Does it bother you that he has attempted to use his drug abuse to gain credibility with young Americans?  Does it bother you that his acknowledgment of having been a serious drug user has been given a pass in the news media?

If any of these facts do bother you, then you obviously fail to recognize their significance.  Don't you see?  Barack Obama is the first U.S. president to admit to cocaine abuse, to describe it in a manner designed to impress the young, and to get away with it.  It's historic.

Consider his most famous "admission."  In Dreams from My Father, the first of his two autobiographies (a historic number of pre-presidential autobiographies), he describes his college drug use this way:

I had learned not to care. ... Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.  Not smack, though[.] ... Junkie.  Pothead.  That's where I'd be headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.  Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was.  Not by then anyway.  I got just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.

Where to begin?  Why does a grown man (34 years old, and about to embark on a state senatorial campaign), looking back on his past from a presumably sober, adult perspective, feel the need to use street lingo like "pot," "blow," and "smack"?  Perhaps it is true that his drug use -- "by then anyway" -- was not aimed at proving "what a down brother" he was, but this adult reversion to the hip language of the street punk certainly is aimed at exactly that. 

George W. Bush, grilled about his alleged drug use, demurred that he had been wayward in his youth, but that God had saved him from all that.  In other words, he at least tried to maintain his adult dignity by drawing an explicit maturity barrier between the numbskull he had been and the gentleman he had since become.  Even Bill Clinton, who never did become an adult, nevertheless saw the need to fake it, and thus produced the Clintonesque charmer about not having inhaled.

By contrast, in 2006, when Jay Leno asked Obama a scripted question about whether he had inhaled, the U.S. Senator smilingly replied, "That was the point."

A clever smack (er, I mean "shot") at Clinton, to be sure, and one which Obama used repeatedly before and during his primary campaign against Clinton's wife...but isn't there something unsavory about a presidential candidate elevating himself above a past president by quipping, in effect, "Clinton was a square; I know how to smoke dope"?

And consider the historic pomposity of his self-justification in that Dreams passage:

I got just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.

What a load of claptrap.  Obama attempts to romanticize, even to mythologize, his drug abuse by musing that, although it may initially have been about proving "what a down brother" he was, it later became part of his struggle for identity -- about pushing "questions of who he was" out of his mind, about flattening his bumpy heart, about blurring "the edges of his memory." 

Stripped of the self-glorifying language, what has he really said?  In boring translation: I started using drugs because I wanted to fit in, but I continued to use them because I got hooked on the sensation of losing contact with reality.  How is this different from the experience of any other "junkie" or "pothead"?

His romanticized language, however, does qualify him as the first president to publish drug poetry, which is certainly historic.  Unless, of course, Jack Cashill is right, and Dreams was actually written by a guy in Obama's neighborhood  named Bill Ayers, in which case Obama would be historic as the first president ever to have his autobiography ghostwritten by someone who, according to an FBI informant, openly discussed the necessity of killing the ten percent of the U.S. population who could not be re-educated after the revolution.

READ MORE...