STRAIGHT DOPE: DRUGGIES WORSE THAN KILLERS?

Sometimes fact is not actually stranger than fiction, just a lot stupider.
Go no further than Columbus, Ga., and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Seems a convicted killer got a raw deal in court and was recently
resentenced with something a tad more lenient. Originally given life in the
pokey with no possibility of parole, it turns out that "prosecutors
realized the sentence was not allowed for his crime," according to an Oct.
21 Associated Press report in the New York Times.

It appears that spending life in the clink is too much for a guy who only
fatally shot his girlfriend. The killer "could have been denied the
possibility of parole for a drug conviction but not for murder," said the
report.

Fancy that. Selling dope is worse than killing your girlfriend. Who'da
thunk it?

"It's a quirk in the law that you can get more time for selling cocaine
than you can for killing somebody," said Superior Court Judge John D. Allen
said. "Maybe one of these days they'll straighten this madness out."

Hopefully, it won't be too long. Lady-killer is eligible for parole in 14
years.

High court catches seizure fever If you're a drug warrior, Oakland, Calif.,
is your kind of town and, since surviving a recent state Supreme Court
challenge, will likely stay that way.

The court's ruling affirms Oakland's car nabbing ordinance, which allows
the city to seize vehicles allegedly used in soliciting drug deals or
prostitution -- and will likely encourage similar laws across the state,
according to the Oct. 19 San Francisco Examiner.

While currently Sacramento is the only other California city with a law
like Oakland's, San Francisco recently fought off a similar plan.

More than 300 vehicles have been seized since January 1998, by Deputy City
Attorney Marcia Meyers' reckoning. And remember, you don't even have to be
charged with a crime to have your vehicle filched because car seizures fall
under asset forfeiture statutes and are considered civil cases, not criminal.

Oh well, I was getting tired of things like justice and liberty, anyway.
Who needs 'em?

Obviously not the drug warriors.

Doing The Junkie Monkey:

The recent marijuana study supposedly showing that monkeys become ganja
junkies was widely reported by the mainstream media last week. Instead of
being the government watchdogs they are supposed to be, however, most news
agencies just reconfirmed their lapdog status by simply regurgitating the
National Institute on Drug Abuse press release about the research with
little or no voices critical of the study's conclusions.

Nobody in the press, for instance, really critiqued the methodology of the
study, which is definitely suspect because the researchers arranged for the
monkeys to self-administer cocaine before trying them on marijuana's active
ingredient, THC. It doesn't take Edward R. Murrow to find a red flag there.

"To me, it is a methodologically questionable procedure to start the
squirrel monkeys on cocaine and then move them to THC," explained Dr.
Lester Grinspoon, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical
School. "They may be dealing with the effects of the monkey's involvement
with cocaine. It certainly complicates what they say happened."

Indeed.

"NIDA's scientists have been trying for years to get lab animals to press
bars for THC, without success," said Steve Kubby, 1998 Libertarian
California gubernatorial candidate and national director of the American
Medical Marijuana Association, "until now. The trick, as described in the
NIDA paper, is to addict the animals first to cocaine. Once the animals
have been trained to press a bar for cocaine, the cocaine was removed and
substituted by THC."

Applying this to humans, I suppose that if you're a coke fan, marijuana
might work well if that's all you can get. But since that's about all this
study really means, it'd be nice if NIDA and the press would stop monkeying
around with the truth.

Barry, We Hardly Knew Ye:

Finally, on a sad note (cue mournful violins here), Gen. Barry McCaffrey,
our nation's beloved drug czar, is turning in his locker key Jan. 6, 2001.
Hold back the tears, folks.

"I'm enormously proud of what we've done," said McCaffrey. "We had
exploding rates of adolescent drug use, and we've reduced it."

Reduced it? Let's try being serious for a moment. "Despite McCaffrey's
repeated claims that 'we are winning' the fight," Arianna Huffington
rebuffed in a recent column, "the use of illegal drugs by junior high kids
has increased by 300 percent; it's easier than ever for high school
students to get drugs; drug prices are at an all-time low, and drug purity
is climbing."

Sure, we're winning the war on drugs the same way we won Alcohol
Prohibition and Vietnam. If that's winning, I'd sure hate to see what
losing looks like.

Though McCaffrey told former New York Times columnist Abe Rosenthal in a
1996 interview that "I've gone a long time in life not getting killed in
combat because I pay attention to details," the toker's Torquemada
apparently wasn't able to carry that trait to his new duties. For all of
his wonderful ability to scope the jots and tittles, McCaffrey has missed
one terribly important detail about the drug war: The only thing being
reduced in this country is liberty.

Sans any Gorish exaggeration, because of the drug war:

1. People's lives are needlessly in danger and sometimes needlessly killed

2. Property rights are diligently disrespected

3. People are assumed guilty based on arbitrary criminal profiles,
regardless of any actual wrongdoing

4. Police use increasingly anti-constitutional methods of smoking out drug
dealers

5. Federal bureaucrats propose skirting Congress to gain their objectives,
usurping the legislature and spitting on the Constitution in the process

6. Politicians and media hype drug fears, while scientists mislead the
populace about the supposed danger of drugs

Barry, we hardly knew ye, it's true. But we knew you well enough. We'll
sure miss you; it's been a real displeasure.

Note: We don't joke with coke