Obama Comes Clean

Signs nicotine control act, admits he still lights up.

The new anti-smoking legislation, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, prevents the advertising of tobacco to children and puts tobacco under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration for the first time.

In signing the bill, Obama was compelled by reporters to admit to his nicotine addiction during a press conference. "Look, I've said before that as a former smoker I constantly struggle with it. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes," Obama said in an article about the news conference by Sheldon Alberts of Canwest News Service.

Typically, for a smoker who can’t quite quit, Obama defended himself by saying, "I don't do it in front of my kids. I don't do it in front of my family."

Obama was said to have convinced his wife to support his bid for the presidency by agreeing to give up cigarettes—a campaign pledge he has not been able to keep, by his own admission.

During the Tuesday press conference Obama compared his addiction to nicotine to an alcoholic's need for a drink. "I don't know what to tell you, other than the fact that, you know, like folks who go to (Alcoholics Anonymous) you know, once you've gone down this path, then, you know, it's something you continually struggle with, which is precisely why the legislation we signed was so important, because what we don't want is kids going down that path in the first place."

During the press conference, an exasperated Obama sought to turn the questions away from his own lingering addiction. "First of all, the new law that was put in place is not about me. It's about the next generation of kids coming up," he said. "So I think it's fair . . . to just say that you just think it's neat to ask me about my smoking, as opposed to it being relevant to my new law. But that's fine. I understand. It's an interesting human interest story."

Graphics Credit: obamasmoking.com

addiction drugs smoking nicotine

Obama’s Addiction

President-elect should come clean about cigarettes.

For a candidacy built on transparency and straightforward messaging, the Obama juggernaut is missing a wonderful opportunity to send direct aid and comfort to struggling addicts everywhere. All the president-elect has to do is admit that he is still struggling to quit smoking cigarettes.

It doesn’t take a campaign genius to understand the reasoning during the primaries: Smoking, something now done behind closed doors, or while leaning against a dark wall out back, was not something Obama’s handlers were eager to have taken up as a topic of discussion with respect to their candidate. The U.K. Guardian maintains that certain opinion polls found Obama’s smoking to be a greater hindrance to his election than the color of his skin.

The recent release of candid black and white photos from Obama’s college years, showing him casually smoking, has brought the issue back to the forefront. “It is a sign of our anxious, needy condition,” opined the Guardian, “that Americans are willing to overlook the president-elect's filthy habit.”

While Nancy Reagan banned smoking in the White House years ago, the cigar-smoking Clinton seems to have gotten a pass, cigars in the popular culture being to cigarettes as the occasional brandy is to a six-pack. While the New York Times debates whether graphic warning labels only increase people’s desire to smoke, nobody seems to be asking whether a president who sneaks out to the Rose Garden to field-strip a Marlboro will serve as a role model or an enabler for fellow smokers.

In a separate article in the Guardian, Alexander Chancellor writes that “Obama appears to have tried really hard to stop, and says he had cut his smoking down to the occasional fag bummed from a member of his staff; but he still hasn’t give up completely, despite being a fitness fanatic who spends more than an hour a day in the gym.” As every addicted smoker who ever tried to quit has discovered, nobody ever sneaks by for long on two or three bummed cigarettes a day. “You either smoke none or you smoke 20,” writes Queenan. “There is no middle ground.”

More to the point, President-Elect Obama is missing out on an opportunity to speak out on a major public health issue. By coming clean about his struggle to overcome his nicotine addiction, Obama would give renewed hope and courage to struggling smokers and ex-smokers everywhere. If Obama, the icon of cool, the Unruffled One, cannot make good on a promise to his wife to quit smoking, then quitting smoking must be one hell of an undertaking.

As Chancellor writes: “The most striking thing about it all is that a man as calm, controlled and disciplined as the next president should have so far failed in his efforts to set himself free. At least I can take comfort from the fact that I am in the most distinguished company. But I also intend to join him in his New Year resolution to stop smoking, mainly in my case because it’s just too expensive.”


Photograph: Lisa Jack/Bloomberg News/Time

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Obama on Drugs

Will he do anything about the Drug War?

One issue largely missing in action during the presidential campaign has been the Drug War, and all the policy implications for addiction treatment that go with it. Our thanks go out to OnTheIssues blog for compiling the admittedly skimpy record of public statements about drug policy by both candidates. In this post, we examine the on-the-record views of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

The official Obama plan, as outlined in his campaign booklet, Blueprint for Change, calls for greater use of drug courts, job training for ex-offenders, and the elimination of sentencing disparities like the crack/powdered cocaine inequities. He does not favor lowering the current drinking age from 21 to 18, despite a collective push to do so by dozens of university presidents.

In an AP report posted at Drug WarRant, Obama said, “I’m not interested in legalizing drugs.” His focus, he said, was on emphasizing the public health approach to drugs over the prison approach. “All we do is give them a master’s degree in criminology.”

In a speech at Howard University, he told the crowd that “it’s time to take a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first-time, non-violent drug users for decades.... We will review these sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive warehousing of non-violent offenders.... So let’s reform this system. Let’s do what’s smart. Let’s do what’s just.”

In reference to the HIV/AIDS crisis, Obama has said that “we have to look at drastic measures, potentially like needle exchange in order to insure that drug users are not transmitting the disease to each other. And we’ve got to expand on treatment.”

Obama himself--a former cigarette smoker--is no complete stranger to drugs, having admitted to high school and college drug use in his book, Dreams from My Father. On page 87, he writes that he used to get high as a way to “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.... Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.”

On a Tonight Show appearance with Jay Leno, when reference was made to President Bill Clinton’s famous claim that he “didn’t inhale,” Obama responded, “That was the point.”

As Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore, wrote: “The relative silence by presidential candidates about the War on Drugs has been disappointing but not surprising. The next president will be in office when we commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Harrison Narcotics Act, which many consider to the beginning of the war on drugs. Hopefully, the new president will listen to the voices of reform....”

It appears that Senator Obama is at least partially receptive to the goal of changing national drug policy “to make the war on drugs a public health battle rather than a criminal justice war,” as Schmoke wrote.

Obama and McCain on Addiction Treatment

Candidates differ on medical marijuana.

A drug and alcohol policy group has released a study of positions on drug policy by the presidential candidates, concluding that "neither John McCain or Barack Obama can really be considered a leader in the drug-policy area."

In an article published on the Join Together website, author Bob Curley notes that Obama has admitted to youthful marijuana and cocaine use, and McCain has admitted to youthful alcohol abuse. Both candidates are former cigarette smokers, Obama having quit only recently. Curley write that "both appear to have a broader and more nuanced understanding of addiction issues than their White House predecessor."

The article also quotes William Cope Moyers, vice president of external affairs at Hazelden treatment center, who says he has "never been more hopeful that addiction treatment will begin to get the attention it deserves, because we at least have two candidates who are aware of the issue." Obama's admission of drug use is already on the table as a potential campaign issue, while McCain purportedly had an alcoholic father, and his wife went through treatment for an addiction to painkillers in the 1990s.

Senator McCain has been active in efforts to regulate tobacco advertising, and advocates smoking cessation programs in the workplace. At other times, he has advocated tougher sentencing for drug crimes and capital punishment for international drug traffickers.

For his part, Senator Obama supported the Second Chance Act of 2007, which aimed at reintroducing veteran drug defenders to society. He has called for greater use of drug courts and rehabilitation programs in lieu of lengthy prison sentences. He is opposed to efforts to lower the drinking age to 18.

McCain is against marijuana legalization, and opposes the use of marijuana for medical purposes. He said he "would not support medical marijuana because I don't think that the preponderance of medical opinion in America agrees...."

Obama, according to the Join Together article, while not ready to let people grow their own, told a reporter in March that "my attitude is that if it's an issue of doctors prescribing medical marijuana as a treatment for glaucoma or as a cancer treatment, I think that should be appropriate because there really is no difference between that and a doctor prescribing morphine or anything else."

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