THE DRUG WAR'S JUST BLOWING SMOKE.

I was on a long bus ride, sitting next to a gentle, weathered black
man, married for 30 years and on his way home from Orlando to Athens.
We were rolling through the moonlit, rolling piney hills of central
Georgia. The conversation turned to drugs.

"So what about the drugs?" Lawson asks.

"Lookie here, Lawson," I said as we purred through some nameless bump
on a map. "If we could somehow convince the driver to stop for 20
minutes and you gave me 20 bucks to buy drugs, you know what I'd come
back with."

Lawson nodded.

"That's right, a coke rock. Wouldn't be no weed; coke. The safest
stuff is the hardest to get. Kinda weird, huh?"

"Yes it is. Why is that?"

"Friend of mine saw Chuck Amato sitting in this Corvette, front of a
7-Eleven, yakking on a cell phone, right? My boy leaps out of the
pickup truck and runs over to the 'vette.

"'Coach, coach,' he says, 'I just got one question.'"

Coach takes the phone from his ear. "What's that?"

"'How come both of the coaches in the Black Coaches Association Bowl
are white?'"

"So he sits there for a second, right? 'Lemme tell ya, son,' coach
says. 'Know what it's all about? It's all about the money.'"

Lawson laughed. "For real?"

"Cute story. But that's the reason it is so easy to get coke and not
weed. Da money. Volume."

The Department of Defense threw in the towel last month on the "war on
drugs," recognizing the unwinnablity of the whole mess. So now, the
Plan Colombia funds (U.S. largesse to one of the worst countries in
the world for human rights violations, cutting people up with
chainsaws and such) have now been quietly shifted to fight "evil
dewers"--oh yeah, and to lock up Colombia's oil.

Amid all this war talk, I can't be the only person who's noticed that
talk of hard drugs (along with the whole continent of South America)
seems to have slipped quietly beneath the waves, replaced by really
unrealistic, dumb TV ads about so-and-so's marijuana dealers.

For some perspective on this, once again class, what are the four
biggest revenue businesses in the world? (1) Weapons (2) Illegal and
diverted drugs (3) Sex (AT&T and General Motors' broadband businesses
are among the world's biggest purveyors of pornography; why do you
think Enron was so hot on broadband?) And (4) Petroleum.

Sounds like a good weekend at Myrtle.

Remember, it was your northern elites, your Russells and such, who got
in with the Brits on what led up to the "Opium War," a conflict fought
to secure the blessings of drug profiteering at the expense of the
Chinese people by violating the sovereignty of that nation,
establishing the franchise against the wishes of the Emperor after
shooting their way up river.

And it's the biggest not-news that it was a dude named Alphonse Capone
who pioneered the drive-by shooting over another unwinnable war.

Hey, everybody got in on that deal. It was on board Old Joe's large,
fast powerboats where JFK cut his teeth, ending up on PT 109 (a vessel
that would have done stellar service as a whiskey boat--torpedo tubes
and all). The modern analog would be George Herbert Walker Bush's
great enthusiasm for a gentleman name of Don Aranow, the capo de capo
of the Cigarette boat works., who, some may remember, got whacked in a
very professional manner in Miami--something about money laundering
and drugs.

More coincidences. GHW Bush, an East-Coast scion of the type normally
inclined toward the gentle flutter of sea and sail, somehow ended up
with one of those vulgar high-speed offshore "racers," Fidelity,
previously owned by a member of the Meyer Lansky crime
organization.

Then there's the case of a certain Beechcraft King-Air, that "Poppy,"
bought for the boys, Dubya, Neil, Jeb and Marvin, that curiously
carried the same tail number as the one owned by a Barry Seal, the
Iran/Contra era CIA/Coke dude who was able to move his operations to
Mena, Ark., continuing to move huge amounts of blow under the nose (so
to speak) of then Gov. Bill Clinton.

Boring, boring, boring. This stuff has been gone over so many times,
notably by journalist Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News as well
as seasoned L.A. homicide and narcotics investigator Michael Ruppert,
both of whom had their lives ruined (Ruppert was shot at twice) after
uncovering what many African Americans like my friend Lawson on the
bus suspected all along--the U.S. government (CIA) peddles crack in
'da ghetto.

But America's drug problem is the world's problem. Profits from the
U.S.'s ongoing party has caused incalculable devastation throughout
the globe, but nowhere is the damage more pointed than in the Andean
region--Colombia, Peru, and now, cross border in Venezuela, where
Colombian troops chase profit-driven "narco-terrorists" into another
country to escape the Round-up Ultra that drifts over fields and
forest, pigs and ponds (and at one point the late Sen. Paul
Wellstone), sprayed by the Colombian military and CIA associated
companies such as DynCorp, (check them out) a plane of whose was
busted in Miami--heroin on board.

But let's for a second forget these troubling facts and history and
estimate real-world how well this war is faring.

For this we turn now to the market report. See, as I used to provide
weed to dying people, I know a little about the business.

First, anyone see the signs on 540 from the DEA, "You think it's dry
now (weed), wait until November?" Well, for all their helicopters
(been in 'em), night-vision this, informant-that, all those dogs and
guns and bullshit, only thing they've managed to do is make it harder
to get, pushing the price up a tick, about 20 bucks an ounce.
Difference is, unlike the white stuff, you have to make a phone call.

For those prices, I have to rely on the word of real, live drug
addicts. Coke seems to be holding steady, 70 to 100, depending on
quality. The biggest non-surprise is that the market price for a good,
clean bag of kill-you-dead downtown straight outta Alston Avenue has
dropped from 30 to 10 bucks in less than a year, courtesy of our good
friends the Northern Alliance flooding the global market with real
quality opium.

The Feds are so losing the war (if that is truly the case, and not
just, as I suspect, a cover) that it would be an object of great humor
were it not for the tens of thousands of poor, dead brown people and
the million or so Americans serving lengthy prison sentences for
non-violent drug convictions. Thanks guys. Nice work.

So, despite the billions of dollars wasted and the millions of lives
ruined by the law, hard drug consumption is up and prices are down.
When are we going to get some brains about this thing and begin to
treat drug use as social issue instead of the old puritan ideal that
if it feels good, it must be crushed.

Now the reality check--the approximate annual death rate from randomly
selected fun-and-games, American style. Cigarettes: 350,000+.
Pharmaceuticals: 125,000 (est). Automobiles: 40,000. Firearms: 15,000.
Alcohol (hard to estimate, a lot of the deaths from "hey y'all, watch
this"): 13,000. Aspirin: 4,000. Cocaine and heroin: each around 3,000.

And ganga?

Zip. Zero. Nada, Nuttin'. None. Not just for last year but for every
year, for all time, for the entire history of pharmacopoeia, there has
never been one single death ascribed to the use of Cannabis. Put that
in your pipe and smoke it.

Who cares about weed? Not local cops, nor the average citizen. That
would be the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the gutless,
mewling vote grubbing sycophants who claim to run this country.

You want money? Forget the lottery. If the State of North Carolina
were to legalize and levy a modest $10 tax on a quarter ounce of weed
(my out-of-thin-air guess for weekly consumption), the take for the
estimated 2 million pot smokers in the state (DEA won't give
estimates, these are from other sources) would be around a billion
(that's b as in nine zeros) per year. Imagine what the state could
make off all drugs if we boxed 'em, taxed 'em and sold them, reduce
the loss of life from drug violence and accidental overdoses. A great
start toward a sensible drug policy would be to rescind the absurd
prohibition on marijuana. Is anyone listening?