QUIT WASTING TIME TRYING TO POLICE VICTIMLESS CRIMES

So-called "D.C. madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey will not go down without
a fight. She has shared her escort service's phone records with ABC
News and inspired the April 27 resignation of State Department
foreign-aid chief Randall Tobias. He admitted to meeting Palfrey's
call girls - "to give me a massage," but he insists, no sex.

While Tobias' wife must be steamed, why is this news? Indeed, if he
were single, some might applaud Tobias for getting lucky. Meanwhile,
Palfrey has hired Preston Burton, Monica Lewinsky's former attorney,
thus returning that notorious name to national prominence.

Palfrey has made headlines because she faces prostitution charges.
Since money changed hands, what otherwise would be mutual assured
seduction instead is, literally, a federal case.

This never should have happened. As in so many places where police and
prosecutors poke their noses, this is something else that should be
none of government's damn business.

There is an argument for discouraging scantily clad streetwalkers from
tarting up their surroundings. This is exactly why discreet escorts,
like Palfrey's, who perform on private property, are preferable to
hookers on street corners.

Again, if Palfrey's colleagues simply trolled Washington, swapping
drinks and dinner for massages and more, no one would notice. So why
then does trading cash for intimacy merit handcuffs and
indictments?

If coercion or minors are involved, please call 911. Otherwise,
police, prosecutors, judges and juries have more urgent concerns than
oppressing those who profit by comforting the lonely.

Prostitutes offer just one service that adults should be free to enjoy
without fear of arrest. So do psychics.

Philadelphia officials should have skipped their recent crackdown on
spiritual advisers. The City of Brotherly Love turned Big Brotherly
when police on April 24 began padlocking psychics' and Tarot-card-
readers' shops. A previously un-enforced third-degree misdemeanor
forbade anyone to "pretend for gain or lucre to tell fortunes or
predict future events," as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Before
defense attorneys intervened, cops hammered these occult
entrepreneurs, supposedly because they bamboozled clueless clients.

Really? In trying times, many Americans see their clergymen. Others
consult bartenders, barbers or bowling partners. So what if some
Americans believe those who peer into crystal balls? Most folks steer
away from seers, but if no one got frog-marched into a seance at
gunpoint, Philadelphia authorities should have focused on those who
faced gun muzzles, namely the 127 people fatally shot or otherwise
killed through April 24, 17.6 percent more than the 108 killed through
that date in 2006.

Speaking of dangerous thugs, thank God cops nabbed Barbara Jackson, a
71-year-old Bronx great-grandmother. Jackson is a colorectal-cancer
survivor whose chemotherapy has crushed her appetite.

"My taste buds are gone, but the marijuana helps me get the food
down," she told the New York Daily News. "The marijuana has kept me
alive. I wouldn't be here if I didn't smoke."

Undercover officers arrested her March 13 when she bought grass near
her home. They whisked her to the 46th Precinct, fingerprinted her and
jailed her for five hours. Thankfully, Bronx prosecutors dropped
charges after local journalists howled.

Despite claims by Jackson and others that marijuana keeps them
breathing, drug warriors trivialize scientific evidence of marijuana's
health benefits. (The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cynically
dismisses marijuana's medical advantages while simultaneously
forbidding marijuana research that might confirm such qualities.)

Again, so what? It doesn't matter whether marijuana clinically
stimulates Jackson's appetite. If it merely convinces her that she can
eat, defeat cancer and stay healthy, isn't that splendid? Barbara
Jackson is an American adult. Provided she does not drive under its
sway, she should be free to choose marijuana to battle cancer, or at
least serve as a placebo.

As Boston University's Dr. David Felson explained on the April 30 "NBC
Nightly News," taking placebos "isn't necessarily a scientifically
valid approach, but it's a clinically helpful approach."

Rather than torment call girls, clairvoyants and cancer patients,
government officials should meditate on a few facts: Only half of
black students graduate from high school on time. Murder erased 16,692
Americans in 2005. Meanwhile, Islamofascists itch to hike that death
toll a thousand-fold. Ignorance, homicide and militant Islam
concretely threaten this republic. Why don't America's hyperactive
public servants go slay those dragons?

Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution and Peace at Stanford University and writes for Scripps
Howard News Service.