STOP THE MADNESS JUST SAY NO MORE

Stop me if you've read this before: Daily reports of drug arrests
published in the Observer. A meth lab discovered off Ramsey Street.
Residential break-ins all over, many of them committed by people
hooked on drugs who steal for money to get enough dope to get them by,
until next time. Gangs powered by guns, crack and cash; innocent
bystanders hurt, and not just in beleaguered Bonnie Doone. Meanwhile,
look to our borderland with Mexico. Have you read "No Country for Old
Men"? You should. It's stark. It's brutal. It's what's happening in
parts of our Southwest. Last week our top national security officials
met with Mexican leaders to talk about the bloodbath that has claimed
nearly 18,000 Mexican lives in violence involving drug cartels. It's
because we Americans, in this land of plenty, can't control our
appetite for drugs.

Remember our 1980s "war on drugs"? How did that pan out? Similar to
our failed Prohibition efforts, only with more lethal weapons and
drugs in play. As I said, stop me if you've read this before.

We need to secure our borders, I agree. That's why, way back in 1916,
members of the Fayetteville Independent Light Infantry found
themselves called up for border-patrol duty, because of the lawless
followers of the notorious Pancho Villa.

That was the so-called U.S. "Punitive Expedition" into Mexico. With
the drug scourge, that's also how we tend to see things,
ever-Puritanically and punitively. We build prisons; we declare a
winless war; we keep spending. As The Wall Street Journal noted last
week, there's a lot of money tied up in our drug-enforcement machine.
This isn't a partisan issue, either. Conservatives such as the late
William F. Buckley have called for legalizing drugs.

How long are we going to keep doing what's not working? Here's what
I'd like to do: Pull the rug out from under them. Just like that, to
try to break this hopeless cycle of addiction and violence - pull the
rug out.

It's a scary prospect, indeed, but it's past time for us to try
something bold, perhaps even enlightened.

And besides: How much worse could it be, anyway