HIGH ON EXPERIMENTATION

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Representative Susan Molinari, the keynote speaker of the Republican National Convention, comes to the podium after providing fresh proof that the behavior of American politicians is not affected in the slightest by ridicule. Officeholders who are confronted with stories of marijuana use in college, as Representative Molinari was after being invited to deliver the keynote, still describe what they were doing with the dreaded weed not as smoking or using but as "experimenting."

What a jolly little laugh we all had the first time that one was used! It takes a person who's running for Congress, we said, to make pot smoking sound like a required laboratory assignment in the honors section of Microbiology 201.

We tried to imagine the 12th-semester junior down the hall--the one with the tangled hair and the Fu Manchu mustache--knocking on the door of a future Senator and saying, "If you've got a little time to devote to the search for truth, some folks in our room are carrying on an experiment in whether the experience of using marijuana is enhanced if you smoke it while listening through earphones to A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum."

If ridicule had any impact, the next pol faced with revelations of sophomore-year marijuana smoking might have responded with, "Sure, I did a little weed in college." But no. The next pol acknowledged that he had "experimented" with marijuana in college. Like the first pol, he said that he experimented very few times and that, in the full wisdom of adulthood, he regrets that he experimented at all. The next pol said the same thing. So did the pol after that.

And here we are, in the summer of 1996, with Susan Molinari--someone who was barely out of college when politicians began to describe collegiate pot smoking as experimentation--saying, "I did experiment with marijuana." She says she did it "less than a handful of times." She says that "looking back on it, it was the wrong thing to do." Evidently the guy with the Fu Manchu mustache still hadn't graduated.

I hasten to say I don't care whether Susan Molinari smoked pot in college. I say this as someone who, being closer in age to Bob Dole than to Susan Molinari, has passed blithely through successive national crazes for marijuana and white wine and Perrier water and microbeers without wavering for a moment in a lifelong loyalty to Scotch whisky.

Apparently Bob Dole doesn't care either. To his credit, his statements in the past reflected a clear understanding that, considering the prevalence of marijuana on campuses during patches of our recent history, eliminating from public office everyone who tried it would leave us with only the sort of people who were elected to Congress as freshman Republicans in 1994.

If people old enough to remember Tojo don't care, why does someone like Molinari hand out this tired malarkey about "experimenting" with marijuana? Because it has been certified as the formula that will put the issue to rest.

Apparently, Molinari didn't know that the first time she was asked about marijuana, in 1992. She said she'd never smoked pot, leaving herself open to being nailed later for lying. Now she understands the drill. When she followed the prescribed script, she instantly became virtuous enough to open the convention. There were no complaints, even from those militant Christian-morality monitors I have come to think of as the Khomeini wing of the Republican Party. Dole and I went back to our Scotches.