This should be explained up front: I am somewhat introverted by nature and I sometimes have issues with social anxiety. Further, there is something about standing in the middle of a room with over 200 people in it, fifteen paces from the Republican senator who won New Hampshire in 2000, that tends to make me quiver a little.

So why would I have chosen to put myself in this position? Because I decided presidential candidates should have to answer difficult questions about the War on Drugs, and somebody has to do the asking…

My efforts began with a trip to meet Bill Richardson at the Candia Public Library in June. He gave me a great answer on medical marijuana, and he even proceeded to tell me “I believe the War on Drugs is not working.”

So it’s nice to see that 37 years after the War on Drugs was declared by President Nixon, a few high profile politicians are able to notice and even admit to the obvious signs of a policy failure: overcrowding of prisons and court dockets, creation of a violent and dangerous black market, enormous waste of tax dollars, failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, and I could go on and on. Educated people who objectively study drug policy have been trying to articulate some sound, alternative strategies to Drug Prohibition, but excellent organizations such as the Drug Policy Alliance, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and others are still just nibbling at the edges of the national consciousness. These issues have got to be discussed in the public sphere, folks, and it’s got to happen sooner than later.

But I digress.

The next candidate I questioned was Mitt Romney, and I knew that whatever I asked, I’d get an answer that would make my skin crawl. If that's what I wanted, I wasn't disappointed by the "Ask Mitt Anything" event I attended in Bedford. As evidence of “progress,” Romney responded to my question by touting the vast sums of our tax dollars which are being spent to poison farmland and support a corrupt government in Columbia. Then he absurdly blamed President Clinton for setting off a wave of increased drug use with his “I didn’t inhale” comment in 1991. Romney also opined that we had to stop even terminally ill patients from using marijuana to make their last days more bearable. And finally, he said we needed another propaganda campaign “as effective as ‘Just Say No’ was.”

Of course I took a few liberties with the above paraphrase, but here, watch for yourself. To me, this is just grisly stuff, folks -- totally out of touch with the reality of a failed policy.

And I expected an equally bad answer from McCain, given his history on the issue. Again, I was not disappointed.

I intended to ask McCain the same question I had asked Romney, which was as follows: “The next president will preside over the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs. Are we winning the War on Drugs? If not, what would you do differently as president?”

And that’s probably what I should have asked him, but by the time the senator acknowledged my hand in the air, I was pretty annoyed by some things he’d already said. So I followed up on a remark he'd made about reducing the demand for drugs in the United States, politely pointed out that we’ve had a War on Drugs for almost 40 years, and asked how he intended to reduce demand. And then, as he was beginning to answer, I couldn’t resist suggesting that there might be some similarities to Alcohol Prohibition.

This put the tired-looking McCain on the defensive. He calmly explained to me that alcohol can be ingested in moderation without ill effects, but that any amount of heroin or cocaine was harmful to a person. Of course he didn’t mention marijuana, which millions of Americans apparently find useful in some regard, and which is demonstrably less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes (tobacco, incidentally, should be quite illegal by his bogus harm-causing standard). These legal substances have killed an awful lot of people, but there is no record in human history of a person who has died just from smoking marijuana. Alcohol is heavily linked to domestic abuse, assault, and impaired driving, whereas marijuana users (despite their omnipresence) don’t seem to cause so many problems for their neighbors.

But this all misses the point of the question. I wasn’t asking McCain to compare intoxicants; I was asking him to compare a notorious policy failure from the past with an obviously similar policy failure in the present.

I say similar rather than identical because there are key differences. For example, cops didn’t really arrest users under Alcohol Prohibition, only sellers. In that sense, Prohibition's ill effects on society were all indirect -- the newly created black market gave rise to gangs, shootings, poisonous "bathtub" liquor, a major increase in deaths from drinking, and widespread disrespect for the law.

Albert Einstein noticed some of this at the very beginning of the Prohibition era. In a 1921 essay called “My First Impressions of the U.S.A.,” Einstein had already observed the course Prohibition would take: “The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law,” he wrote. “For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

Twelve crime-ridden years later, Alcohol Prohibition was repealed. That was how long it took for people to figure out that while alcohol may have been bad, Prohibition was a lot worse.

But as I acknowledged earlier, Drug Prohibition is not identical to Alcohol Prohibition. It’s a pretty big difference that Drug Prohibition threatens American citizens with arrest and incarceration for simply possessing a banned substance. Further, we know that law enforcement uses “tools” (beware of this word) such as no-knock raids based on anonymous tips; we know that they infiltrate society with legions of taxpayer-funded snitches; and we know that they seize valuable property left and right under asset forfeiture laws, often in cases where the defendant is never even charged with a crime, let alone convicted. It’s pretty easy to see why the late economist Milton Friedman said the War on Drugs is really a war on people -- a war waged by a government against its own citizens.

So getting back to McCain… McCain told me there was no similarity between Alcohol Prohibition and the War on Drugs. And like Romney, he thinks we need to institute another “Just Say No” campaign, as if that actually worked the first time around.

A few minutes later, I simply had to leave the room. My heart was thumping and my mind was racing. So I exited quietly, improving the view for the persons behind me, and headed for a little path into the woods behind Wright Museum.

Once I was safely alone in the woods, I made a phone call to my friend Tim in California. Tim's only brother, age 21, was shot dead in a small-time marijuana deal by an undercover cop in the early 80's, and Tim (not surprisingly) blames Marijuana Prohibition for his family's loss. His appreciative voice was the one I most needed to hear.

And if I could remind McCain of one fact, it would be that nobody gets shot in alcohol deals. Not anymore, because we got smarter and changed a failing policy...

Meanwhile, back in the museum, Natalie Hickmon was asking McCain his position on medical marijuana. Specifically, she asked what he would do to stop the DEA from raiding state-licensed clinics in California and elsewhere. McCain's answer: "Nothing."

Well, there you have it, folks. And here it is on video: