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.