War on Drugs, as if we needed further proof

In the San Francisco Tenderloin district, cops and drug thugs are demonstrating the degree to which  the War on Drugs  has been lost.  The city has conceded defeat and settles for a short cease-fire  every week-day morning and afternoon.

Along the route children take to a Catholic school, there is a stepped-up police patrol. Officers  shoo away the ubiquitous street dealers so the children aren't exposed to them.  When they're locked safely in the school, the cops drift off, and  Flydaddy  returns to vend his bags of  white powder. It's hard to think of a better example of the futility of  enforcing laws which are primarily unrealistic words on paper.


Decriminalizing narcotics for adults would have  its own nightmare problems of administration, enforcement and education,  but what could possibly be worse than a message to drug dealers that, yeah, you've won; we ask, however,  that you take your coffee breaks  while the  wee ones are walking to school. Then you can go ahead with your felonies, and we probably won't get around to annoying you too much.

One of the facts  we mention too seldom is the price of drugs.  The pharmaceutical cost of  cocaine and heroin is something like 2 per cent of its illegal -- street -- cost. The other 98 per cent is a government  contribution to the  net worth and cash flow of drug czars and their serfs.

That 2 per cent estimate is from an old William F. Buckley statement, as is his report that more Americans die from drug-war violence than from the use  of the drugs themselves.

No Jeep.

The Sunday Funnies

AP has a weekend feature on John  Boehner who would probably become speaker of the house if Republicans win big enough in November.The profile concentrates on what he'll try to do as speaker, and the writer tosses in a phrase about the trouble he would face trying to reconcile neocon Republicans and the "Increasingly libertarian-leaning (GOP) caucus."

It's pleasant to see the phrase in print, but whatever libertarian leaning is going on isn't enough to capsize the USS Business-As-Usual.

Show me 75 GOP congress critters who  will risk their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honors  (t' hee)  -- not to mention the Dantesque horror of losing an election --  to dismantle the Departments of Education, HUD, HHS, and Energy. Then, if  they will also vow to risk their all to end the War on Drugs (which has been lost since, roughly, the day Bill Clinton didn't inhale),  why,  then I'll agree the GOP caucus might be trending toward  libertarianism.

But let me repeat my pleasure in seeing even the word "libertarian" so high in a national story. Are we approaching the end of the era requiring us to explain that, no, it is not a misspelling of "liberal?"

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Down a little lower we run into one of those sneaky, perhaps unconscious, one-word editorials in a "news" story.

"Boehner already has a somewhat wary alliance with several younger and more dogmatic GOP members. "


Dogmatic? Would the writer have used that word to describe some  hard-core leftist congress critters? Of course not.  The required adjective in those cases is  "principled."

Generous Iowa

As I mentioned recently, my pride is unbounded in the self-sacrificing spirit of the Hawkeye State. We give you corn, soy beans, presidents, and a culture of Grant Woodism for your sophisticated amusement. But I was especially taken with a morning headline reporting that Indianapolis is  a special  beneficiary of our sharing spirit.

It reads "Apes Leave Des Moines, Become Hoosiers," because our "Great Ape Trust"* is sending four Orangutans to the Indianapolis zoo.

I speculated the gift might well be two legislators,  a governor, and our DNR director.

Reading the whole story sort of spoils the fun. What you're really getting is something like that, only hairier.

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*Yes, we have one. Don't ask.