Drug war lost to wishful thinking

The government continues to rely on P.T. Barnum's belief
(apparently correct) that there is another sucker born every
minute. A frontpage article in the Aug. 26 Chronicle noted,
"U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey came to this border city Monday
and vowed to enlist Mexico's help in a war he predicts can be won
in a decade."

Sure: The same logic that created Mexico's drug lords and helped
them grow to control 8 percent of the world's illegal drug market
will now destroy them. During alcohol prohibition, an IRS man
responsible for stopping the flow of alcohol was quoted, "Soon we
will live in a world that knows not alcohol."

A gullible public, drowning in a sea of wishful thinking, has
encouraged this fiasco by swallowing this humbug from every
president from Richard Nixon forward and from each of the "drug
czars" as well.

It's bad enough that we have forgotten Prohibition, but we seem
to have lost even the capacity to remember that marijuana was
only recently an import that we curtailed, and it fast became the
No. 1 cash crop grown in America.

Jerry Epstein,
Houston