SAGAN: DRUG WAR IS GOING TO BURN US ALL

Fire.

It's dangerous. It's beautiful. It is fearful in its potential. It is useful.

Employed in a case of arson it can do enormous harm to property; it can
kill people in a hideous way.

Society has come to grips with fire. In spite of the horrendous danger it
represents, almost every home has it, almost anyone can make it. We start
early teaching our children about it - how to create it, how to use it
wisely, what the dangers are. We build fire stations and we train
firefighters to deal with fires that exceed our control, either by accident
or design. Our laws and technology for containing fire stop short of
eliminating it.

Fire is available to everyone, including those who would use it to do harm.
When we were considering the Bill of Rights, no one ever mentioned, much
less argued, the right to make and use fire. Even by the time Europeans
settled America, fire was a resource, a tool for humanity the benefits of
which far outweighed the dangers. It was such a common artifact of society
that our forefathers would probably have concluded it was too obvious a
freedom to enshrine.

It didn't have to be this way. We might have heeded a segment of society
that saw fire as evil. After all, even the Bible refers to hell as a place
of fire. (Of course, our Bible is the product of a desert people. The Norse
version of hell is freezing cold.) Fire being an evil in the world, fire
being something that could be abused with terrible effect, fire being the
weapon of choice for wicked people, we might have made war on it. We might
have:

Confiscated all petroleum and its derivative products.

Burned what we confiscated, or converted it to the use of the state.

Prohibited the private possession or production of any fire-making
substances - on pain of long imprisonment and loss of all tangible assets.

Tested children on arrival at school to see if they had any "fire stuff" on
them and chastised them ardently for every perceived abuse. As we all know,
though, that is not the path we took with fire.

For myself, I am happier knowing that I cannot be stopped and searched for
the presence of, say, flints. Or small bits of paper. Or lint. Which, if
discovered, can have me jailed and impoverished.

For the city of Lockney, I believe we might all benefit from asking
ourselves if we shouldn't be satisfied with the resolution of the school
drug testing program. After all, we have stopped doing something intrusive
and unprincipled to a group of our own young about whom we have every
reason to believe the best.

But the Lockney case brings us to a more important focal point -- the
question of whether we should commit ourselves politically to stamping out
the dangers we individually embrace.

Drug testing in schools proceeds from an array of false assumptions: that
"drugs" can captivate people against their will, that children will do what
is wrong if they aren't forced to do what's right, that the innocent have
nothing to hide, that the state possesses superior wisdom about what is
best for each of us.

Drug testing instead establishes the idea that we are free only as long as
we don't act like it, that we owe it to the state to prove we haven't done
anything wrong, that "prior restraint" is a valid judicial doctrine in a
free country.

Lockney brought this issue into specific relief. The state views any lack
of cooperation as an admission of guilt, and the general public is content
to throw "them" to the wolves as long as "we" are left alone.

But we consistently overlook the fact that the arguments and tactics we
apply to combating drugs can be applied to every expression of free will.

Drugs are with us in our society. "Good" ones, "bad" ones, street and
prescription, natural and synthetic, expensive and cheap. Every one of us
will either:

Learn how to deal with them, or

Die. Society must permit this route to learning. We don't make our children
responsible with fire by denying them access to it. We all know that
sometime they are going to leave the protection of our rules and find out
some things for themselves. We all know that they may be good and
trustworthy or dastardly and unreliable with the gift of fire, that they
will probably experiment with it and do some stupid things while they are
learning, that it may kill them.

So maybe it's time we stopped trying to club ourselves into a prone and
virtuous submission over drugs. Maybe it's time we stopped treating our
children like they were undiscovered felons, started treating substance
abuse as the symptom it is instead of as the root of all evil.

Maybe we ought to reverse the trend toward personal tolerance and
collective responsibility.

Maybe the lesson of Lockney is to treat drugs like we treat fire.

Manage the heat, use the light.