Retired U.S. General Barry McCaffrey has announced that he is now
retiring from his position as America's drug czar.

If only he would take the war on drugs with him.

Of all the domestic wars that the U.S. government has waged in the
last several decades, the war on drugs has got to be the most immoral
and destructive of them all.

The drug war has constituted a frontal attack on individual liberty.
It has caused the death and destruction of innocent people, not only
in America but overseas as well.

And by everyone's standards, the war on drugs has failed to accomplish
its own purported goals despite at least 30 years of warfare.

The drug war enables and encourages the police to peer into your
windows, examine your trash, monitor your bank accounts, turn your
children into stool pigeons, and haul you into court and send you to
jail for engaging in what public officials consider to be personal,
immoral conduct within the privacy of your very own home.

What do they have to show for it after 30 years of warfare? Good
intentions?

Through it all, they've never answered two fundamentally important
questions with respect to the issue of individual liberty.

Why should the state have the power to punish adults for ingesting
harmful substances?

Doesn't the very essence of human liberty entail the unfettered right
to engage in self-destructive behaviour?

For more than three decades, the drug was has assaulted our liberty,
invaded our privacy, increased our taxes, and provided an innocent
cover for government bigotry.

It's time to put the was on drugs out to pasture.

Alan and Eleanor Randell