DRUG WAR FINDS ITS ATTILLA

George W - the guy who claims to be President Compassionate, the guy
who concedes of himself that he 'may or may not have committed' drug
crimes of 'youthful indiscretion' well into his thirties - now is
pushing a drug policy of squinty-eyed intolerance, inflexibility,
meanness... and proven stupidity.

To put the hammer to the policy, President Nasty has chosen John P.
Walters to be his Drug Czar. Walters is a hard-line, shoot-'em-down,
throw-'em-in-jail- and-throw-away-the-key drug hawk who doesn't want
to hear any wimpy talk about people's constitutional rights or the
need for drug treatment programs. Indeed, in senate testimony, Walters
snarled that drug rehab is the latest manifestation of the liberal's
commitment to a "thera-peutic state."

W's new Czar is a right-wing ideologue who has made a career as a
professional drug-war hustler, always talking tough at the expense of
the sick and impoverished he so gleefully exploits for his own
advancement.

Walters is the Dr. Strangelove of our country's absurd drug war - he
dismisses anyone who says our nation's prisons are too full; he favors
longer jail sentences for marijuana users; he has declared that
there's too much "treatment capacity" in the U.S.; he opposes efforts
to address the racial discrepancies in drug enforcement; he wants
more militarization of the drug war at home and abroad; he'd like to
see an expansion of our government's war in Colombia, and he's been a
noisy opponent of state initiatives to allow the medical use of marijuana.

Ironically, Walters was a deputy drug czar in Daddy Bush's
administration, where he was in charge of reducing the supply of
narcotics flowing into our country. Remember what a fine success that
was?

Failure and irony, however, bounce right off of Bush and Walters, who
will continue stumbling down the same costly, ineffectual drug-war
path, blinded by ideology and political opportunism, operating on the
perverse principle that if brute force isn't working, let's just use
more of it.