WHY IS THERE STILL A WAR ON DRUGS?

This is the question our libertarian-leaning friends were asking over at
National Review Online last Friday, December 19. And they weren't asking it
because they think the war has been won. They assume it has been badly lost.

That same day, however, the president's Office of National Drug Control
Policy released an astonishingly good piece of news: The latest federal
survey shows "an 11 percent decline in drug use by 8th, 10th, and 12th
grade students over the past two years. The finding translates into 400,000
fewer teen drug users over two years." Says Bush drug czar John P. Walters:
This means "teen drug use has [declined to] a level that we haven't seen in
nearly a decade."

And what was a big factor in changing teen attitudes toward drug use? The
controversial anti-drug advertising campaign run by the drug czar's office,
one of whose themes--the link between terrorism and revenues from
trafficking--was also highlighted on December 19. The Navy announced that
day that it had intercepted a boatload of hashish in the Persian Gulf.
Three of the men on board were believed to have al Qaeda ties. Bruce
Hoffman, a RAND terrorism expert, was quoted by the AP as calling this "the
first empirical evidence I've seen that conclusively links al Qaeda with
the drug trade."

Between the teens and the war on terror, that adds up to 400,001 good
reasons why there's still a war on drugs.