Thanks to my colleague who posted this fascinating 2000 interview with Jimmy Carter’s first drug czar, Peter Bourne, who claims:

– With Reagan came a major federal law shift — supported by people at the DEA — from heavily focusing on treatment for illegal drugs to criminalizing;

– Cocaine is nowhere near as dangerous as claimed by those advocating harsh penalties against cocaine;

– Paraquat was sprayed on Mexican marijuana plants at the behest of the Mexican government, with the U.S. okay to use U.S.-supplied aircraft to do so;

– Paraquat spraying did not cause a health risk to American marijuana smokers, because the Paraquat would have entirely killed off any marijuana it touched;

– Despite High in America’s suggestion to the contrary, Bourne denies using cocaine at a 1978 NORML party;

– Bourne resigned as drug czar — moving later as a U.S. official at the United Nations — prior to the publicized claim of snorting marijuana, and instead to reduce fallout to Carter for Bourne’s having prescribed a sleeping drug in a patient’s anonymous name, which practice he claims was okay for doctors to employ.

I also learned that Bourne, who claimed to remain a good friend with Jimmy Carter long after his presidency, wrote a 1997 500-page book on Carter, and continued to this day working in public health and medicine. Also, the Bourne in Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity comes from Peter Bourne’s name.