IN WAR ON DRUGS, SLAP CUFFS ON TRUE CRIMINALS

FDA Warning: This column may cause certain side effects, including the
realization that we're governed by drug dealers.

A Food and Drug Administration panel this week urged that a medical
giant called Inamed Corp. should be allowed to start making silicone
breast implants again.

Given that the implants are made of the stuff Jack Nicholson fell into
to become the Joker in "Batman," they've been banned for the last 11
years.

Experts and maimed women testified for hours that when they leak --
which over time they almost certainly will -- they make a woman's
chest look like the thing that ate Boba Fett in "Return of the Jedi."

Hearing that, the FDA sided with Inamed anyway. It gave no real reason
for allowing a poison product on the market other than its honest and
heart-felt compassion: Breast cancer survivors sometimes get the
implants, and even if they are dangerous, the FDA explained, someone
with an awful disease should be able to roll the dice for themselves
and do whatever makes them feel better.

That's a pretty nice gesture, one I've been arguing for years should
apply to marijuana. Unfortunately, this policy only pertains to water
balloons filled with poisonous sludge.

The Supreme Court -- whose nine members are a birthday away from
becoming the cast of "Cocoon" -- ruled this week that the same
patients' rights-sensitive federal government can't get its wish and
punish doctors for discussing the benefits of pot to patients with
glaucoma, AIDS, cancer and other terminal illnesses.

If doctors even mention pot, the administration wanted permission to
revoke their federal license to write prescriptions and dispense drugs.

If you won't sell dope for the drug cartels that make up the American
pharmaceutical industry, their government enforcers will make sure you
don't sell it for anyone.

I call the co-ownership of the legal drug trade a
cartel, but that's an insult to Colombian cocaine
lords. At least Pablo Escobar was honest about what he
did. Our guys tout this Partnership for a Drug-Free
America, but the real partnership is between the
government and the 13th-largest political contributor
in America: the pharmaceutical cartels.

In return for funding their elections, the feds let the cartels set
drug prices (literally, there are no price caps on prescriptions),
allows them to badger and bribe doctors into becoming pushers and even
do their enforcement for them. They punk down old people caught
sneaking to Canada for drugs they can actually afford and trick the
public into thinking the drugs the cartels don't sell -- like pot --
are too dangerous to take, even for the terminally ill. They play out
this ruse while helping the cartels make billions hawking stuff like
allergy medicine that comes with side effects such as nausea,
headaches, perpetual bleeding, sudden limb loss and the condition
known as sausage fingers.

They're the Crips, only without the corn rows and blue head rags. They
give you the first one free and they get Bob Dole and Mike Piazza to
tell you all the cool people are doing it. They pay tiny amounts of
money to test their product on live poor people in "clinical trials."
They even sling their Ritalin and Prozac to school children.

This nation of addicts is their turf, and they have a drug for
absolutely everyone, from my grandmom to Rush Limbaugh. They have a
taxpayer-funded debacle called the war on drugs to make sure they're
the only ones doing the selling, and a government PR campaign to trick
us into thinking cocaine is worse for you than Oxycontin, Codeine or
Valium.

And although I like cleavage as much as anyone, this breast implant
decision sums up the disgrace of this whole thing. Silicone will soon
be legal again even though it's useless and deadly while growing pot,
which is useful and virtually harmless, is a felony.

And that's just it. If anyone with a watering can and a copy of High
Times can grow it, the cartels who pay to get our leaders elected
couldn't sell it at a billion times what it's worth if it ever did
become legal. And that's why Bush is fighting as hard as Clinton did
to make sure it remains a crime.

Not because legalization would be harmful for us, but because it would
be harmful for the cartels they answer to.