SAY, NOW, HERE'S AN ISSUE

As I suggested yesterday, seeing ``issues'' as discrete and unrelated
entities has allowed the law of unintended consequences to run riot. Add to
that the brainless pandering by the presidential candidates coupled with
the implacable will of the big-money donors, and very quickly things spiral
out of control.

It would be nice if the big-party candidates were talking about this, but
they're not.

For example: The $1.3 billion being funneled into Colombia to purchase
American arms and armaments, particularly attack helicopters. The
government of Colombia needs weapons to fight the rebels, who have already
purchased their own helicopters with money from the pockets of American
cocaine sniffers.

As MacArthur Award-winning journalist Mark Danner has reported, President
Clinton piously announced in Cartagena that ``this money is for fighting
drugs, not waging war.'' This conjures up the surrealistic vision that
perhaps the drugs themselves, being so darned dangerous and powerful, have
purchased helicopters, and there's some three-way firefight going on for
valuable upland agricultural real estate.

So we are entering another civil war, all the time fiercely denying that we
are entering a civil war. Both Gore and Bush are in favor of this behavior
because we are after all fighting drugs, which we are doing ``for the
children.''

The CIA failed to think of the children when it supported drug runners all
over Central and South America because drug runners were after all not
communists (free-market capitalism would be their system of choice). But
all that is behind us now. We haven't paid off a drug overlord since . . .
well, we won't know that until the documents are unsealed in 2050.

It is safe to say, however, that the government is lying to us. It has
always lied to us about our actions in this hemisphere. Pick a president:
If his lips are moving and he's talking about South America, he's lying.

AMAZINGLY, EVEN AS we spend the money, we know that the effort is doomed.
The entire thing is an election-year gesture, because no one ever got
defeated voting for ``anti-drug'' policies. Getting ``tough on crime'' is a
sure winner. Reality is of no consequence; it's all about swagger.

Follow this: Our country is funding both sides of the Colombian civil war.
It's the cocaine users on one side versus the taxpayers on the other,
overlapping subsets of the same community. Government attempts to interdict
the flow of cocaine into the United States have merely succeeded in moving
the problem around the region, Bolivia to Peru to Colombia. There's too
much money at stake -- America should understand, if it understands nothing
else, the power that limitless profits exert on the human imagination.

We could work at the other end, with programs designed to limit demand --
lots of addicts would rather not be addicts -- but those policies are not
politically sound. They risk the dread ``soft on'' label. Much safer are
calls for more severe penalties; better to turn addicts into criminals and
then put them in high-walled graduate schools of crime techniques and
alienation.

Major-party candidates do talk about drugs, of course -- prescription drugs
comma high cost of. Prescription drugs are used by people-likely-to-vote
who are also people-not-in-prison. Indeed, some of them are merely people
who became addicted to a semilegal drug, and thus the issue is how to make
it cheaper for them to continue their addiction.

Hey, if we made cocaine available by prescription while outlawing Valium,
we could a) stabilize the nation of Colombia, b) give an amusing lesson in
underclass survival techniques to a whole new population and c) ensure that
``the children'' were getting loaded on something that would cause them to
fall asleep before they could commit petty crimes. I mean, just an idea.

When I say ``bad drugs,'' I mean drugs that make you feel good.

Casey Jones better watch your jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.