A TOUGH WITHDRAWAL FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS

It'll be a long wait, but I shiver in anticipation of the day when the
righteous, addicted to bloodless principles, quit cold turkey their wont of
harshly judging others.

I want to see how often they fail. I want to see them hate themselves for
it. I want to see how adept they are at picking themselves up, dusting
themselves off, and starting over again, and again, and again.

The only thing that separates the addicts of righteousness from cokeheads
like Darryl Strawberry and Robert Downey, Jr., is that their addiction,
despite its perniciousness, is legal, though acting it out sometimes
crosses the line.

Think Tim McVeigh. Who thinks himself more righteous than he? Or think
those who want to see him dead, especially our righteous U.S. Attorney
General, John Ashcroft, whose Good Book tells him not to kill and whose
political principles goad him to do just that. No surprise he doesn't
measure up. Christianity has never been for sissies. I get all tingly
imagining him in righteousness withdrawal.

This is not a defense of either Strawberry or Downey.

With brains degraded by chemicals, both seem loathsomely shallow, with
lives to which they've affixed no purpose. Both have exhibited death wishes
that they sadly are likely to realize sooner rather than later. They have
to feel bad about their notoriety and its underpinnings. They have to hurt
knowing themselves to be slip-sliders when righteous people want backbone
and willpower from them. But tough qualities are not the stuff of
addiction. Relapsing is.

In their current condition, the two are sorry specimens. Their state calls
for intervention by those who know about addictive disease. It calls for
psychiatry and group support. Perhaps medication. It calls for counseling.
It calls for patience and awareness that relapse is often part of
withdrawal, and that some get to total withdrawal by extending the periods
between falls. Most of all, it calls for charity. To incarcerate,
especially in places without treatment, is to invite a jitterbugger to a
gavotte.

A medical approach is at odds with the righteous who craft the "x-number of
strikes and you're out" jail programs and tough poses that don't heal,
programs that punish some, but far from all, addictions.

George Soros, the multi-billionaire who is spending big time to move the
care of drug addicts out of the righteous-prison model and into the medical
model, has his head in the right place. If I had a bundle, I'd do the same.

My observations come from my own stop-smoking efforts, a travail marked, as
most addiction, withdrawals are, by an embarrassing number of relapses. I
won via a process in which I never beat on myself for failing and began
each day with new resolve. I didn't have police looking to bust me, which
certainly helped.

The war on illegal drugs is a canard. Even with the Colombian cartels
destroyed, victory is not in sight. It is money down a sinkhole, money that
in Latin America underwrites regimes at war with their own people that are
sucking us into what a screenwriter friend calls another "Narco-Nam."

A May 3 piece by T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times shows we're
well on the way. It tells of the growing threat of our involvement in
Colombia's civil war, as rebels turn to drugs to underwrite arms purchases
and government officials try to keep us in their game by emphasizing the
drugs rebels use as currency, and not the rebellions.

"Politically it's better to say we're fighting narco-traffickers," Mr.
Miller quotes a Colombian general. "But really, we're fighting our war. The
best is to say what people want to hear."

We already give Colombian military officers intelligence on guerrilla
movements in drug zones with no limits on their use of it, Mr. Miller
writes. The rebels have been fighting for land reform and a redistribution
of wealth for nearly half a century.

He cites a 1992 CIA report predicting that "Andean governments would try to
capitalize on whatever ties were discovered between the FARC (Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia) and the drug trade to obtain more military
assistance from the United States."

That play is already in motion, with the addicted righteous cheering from
the bleachers.

A medical approach to narcotics addiction, like one we have for nicotine
addiction, would make such nonsense impossible. It would also put the
righteous, legal, punitive anti-narc industry on the skids. There are lots
of vested interests to be placated - the jails that house our young, the
hotshots who shoot down missionaries' planes. But most important, the
righteous would have to face withdrawal. And they aren't up to it.