RICHARD NIXON'S PARANOIA LIVES ON IN THE WORLD'S LONGEST WAR

It's too early to say that there is a general revolt against the "war
on drugs" the United States has been waging for the past 39 years,
but something significant is happening. European countries have been
quietly defecting from the war for years, decriminalizing personal
consumption of some or all of the banned drugs in order to minimize
harm to their own people, but it's different when countries like
Argentina and Mexico do it.

Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The U.S.
can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it has a
long history of doing just that. But from Argentina to Mexico,
nations are growing tired with the violent and dogmatic U.S. policy
on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.

In mid-August, the Mexican government declared that it will no longer
be a punishable offence to possess up to half a gram of cocaine
(about four lines), five grams of marijuana (around four joints), 50
mg of heroin or 40 mg of methamphetamine.

At the end of August, Argentina's supreme court did something even
bolder: it ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, "Each adult
is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the
state," and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for
possessing a few joints.

In an ideal world, this ruling would have a powerful resonance in the
United States, whose constitution also restricts the right of the
federal government to meddle in citizens' private affairs. It took a
constitutional amendment to enable the U.S. Congress to prohibit
alcohol in 1919 (and another amendment to end alcohol Prohibition in
1933), so who gave Congress the right to criminalize other
recreational drugs with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970? Nobody
- - and the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue.

Legalization and regulation, on the pattern of alcohol and tobacco,
would avoid thousands of violent deaths in the U.S. each month and
millions of needlessly ruined lives each year, although psychoactive
drug use would still take its toll from the vulnerable and unlucky,
just as alcohol and tobacco do.

But there is little chance that American voters will soon choose to
end this longest of all American wars, even though its casualties far
exceed those of any other war since 1945. The " War on Drugs" will
not end until a very different generation comes to power.

Elsewhere, however, it is coming to an end much sooner, and one can
imagine a time when the job of the history books will be to explain
how this berserk aberration ever came about. A large part of the
explanation will then focus on the man who started the war, Richard
Nixon - so let us get ahead of the mob and focus on him now.

We can do that because of the famous Nixon tapes that recorded almost
every word of his presidency. It turns out that he started the war on
drugs because he believed they were the result of Jewish plot. We
know this because researcher Doug McVay from Common Sense on Drug
Policy, a Washingtonbased NGO, went through the last batch of tapes
when they became available in 2002 and found Nixon speaking as follows:

"... every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana
is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is
the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."

One should not conclude Nixon was a single-minded anti-Semite. He was
an equal-opportunity paranoid who believed that homosexuals,
Communists and Catholics were also plotting to undermine America by
pushing drugs at it.

"Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors
were fags ... But when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to
hell in, I don't know, three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual .

"Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no ... You see,
homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies
of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers
are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us."

The reason for this 39-year war, in other words, is that Nixon
believed that he was facing a "
Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrinklefty-pope" conspiracy, as Washington
Post writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in
2002. But that is just plain wrong.

As subsequent developments have shown, it is actually a
Jew-homo-doper-Commieshrink-lefty-pope-LATINO conspiracy.