Marijuana In the White House Garden?

Washington was in a tizzy Friday as the new first lady, Michelle Obama, broke ground on a White House garden -- the first serious garden at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since World War II, when Eleanor Roosevelt began the FDR Victory Garden.

There is quite a lot of difference between then, the era of the Greatest Generation, and today. From what I've heard, this new Obama Garden will be "organic."

This, to my ears, sounds like these Obamas are planning no less than a marijuana garden, just steps from our nation's Executive Mansion.


In the decades before my generation, America was all about hard work and being tough. We -- or they, I should say -- did not plant marijuana in the White House garden. First of all, only the Roosevelts lived at the White House. The rest lived in other places, mostly hovels and "hobo jungles." But we, or they, had great dignity. You did not hear about them going to see Jay Leno, not at all.

Marijuana did not become illegal in the United States until the first decades of the 20th Century, when Mexicans came to this country. Fearful of the "loco weed" these Mexicans carried with them across the new border, American legislators began passing laws against the weed, which was said to cause both insanity and sex crime.

Unfair? Yes. Racially intolerant? Such is the history of this nation.

But prohibition is hardly a prudent approach in this current year, when statistics show most Americans of all backgrounds are "getting high" as they have since the 1960s, the decade of civil rights and the Beatles, when my generation fought important battles.

Times have changed, of course, and today I would no more support the sex crimes of a marijuana fanatic than I would support the growing of "ganja" at the White House, or at AIG. But as the new Attorney General, Eric Holder, has made it national policy to let medical professionals give marijuana to people in free states such as California, it seems certain that the times really are a-changin'.

Note to Readers: My secretary mailed me a request about "Twitter," which is apparently a new technology in which one types notes to friends and colleagues, using a mobile phone. I do not care for this idea.

In my day, notes were scrawled by hand on small spiral-bound Reporter's Notebooks, which were issued exclusively to credentialed journalists in the nation's best newsrooms. You would no more send a message via your mobile telephone than you would write a critical opinion of a television personalty on the business channel.

These twitters are a vulgar breach of our best instincts. Keep your twits. I will continue to cherish the blessed realities of the real world -- the taste of de-caf coffee, the smell of the neighbor's rose garden, the tug of a child's hand as it tries to get away.

Ken Layne is a syndicated columnist for the Washington political website Wonkette.