RAVENEL PLAYS THE VICTIM

William F. Buckley, conservative icon, warned 16 years ago: "The War
on Drugs is lost." Since then, increasing numbers of Americans across
a wide ideological range have raised practical and constitutional
objections to the flawed law-enforcement approach to the problem of
illegal drugs.

So it's hardly a surprise to see a man elected to statewide office in
South Carolina as a self-billed conservative Republican in 2006
joining the chorus against the drug war.

But while Thomas Ravenel offers some persuasive -- and some not so
persuasive -- points on that issue in a column on today's Commentary
page, he's the wrong spokesman for this particular cause. That's not
because of the arguments he put in his column.

It's because of these facts he left out:

Less than a year after becoming state treasurer, Mr. Ravenel resigned
while facing drug charges. He eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy
with intent to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to 10 months in
federal prison.

So when Mr. Ravenel decries drug "prohibition" as "a violation of our
civil rights," he sounds as if he's playing the victim. Yet Americans
have no constitutional right to pick and choose which laws they will
obey.

And Mr. Ravenel's self-serving pitch about how heroin, alcohol and
tobacco inflict many more fatalities than cocaine sounds as if he's
minimizing that drug's insidious dangers.

Growing ranks of Americans rightly agree that more treatment and less
jail time is in order on the illegal-drug front. But that doesn't mean
many of them favor legalizing cocaine.

As the plague of drug addiction shows, Mr. Ravenel's nostalgia for the
good old 19th century days when "drugs were legal and could be bought
in grocery stores and pharmacies" is misplaced.

And as a candidate for drug-law reformer, Mr. Ravenel is clearly
miscast.