THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOULD TARGET CATS

I've figured out why the War on Drugs isn't working. It's because the
Drug Czars are going after the wrong element.

Instead of chasing drug warlords through the jungle and busting kids
for drinking too much espresso, they should be hunting down America's
cats. That cats abuse chemicals has always been a suspicion of mine.
In my lifetime, I have been owned by approximately 295 animals of the
feline persuassion, and only one was remotely sane. The rest - I am
now firmly convinced - were on some kind of mind-altering chemical.
For example: my cat Jed. This cat loved to swim. Lakes, bathtubs, the
ocean. He would jump out of a moving car to get to water. Our cat
Fatboy revels in catnip. He rolls around in it and looks up at us with
dopey appreciative eyes. The hangover lasts two days. But my friend
Jodi's cat is all kinds of messed up. I tell her she should have tried
nipping this in the bud, when her dog, Bernie, brought home a scared,
skinny kitten he'd found in the woods.

Look at the evidence: n Abandoned by his mother - and surrounded by
the bones of his siblings. n Mistaken sexual identity: Based on the
expert opinion of cat-loving friends, Jodi named her new cat
Bernadette, in honor of the dog that saved its life. But when Jodi
brought "Bernadette" in to be spayed, the veterinarian told Jodi he
would be neutering him instead, and maybe (wink, wink) Jodi should
change his name to Bernie.

"But ... that's our dog's name," Jodi said with a heavy sigh. "OK.
We'll call him Stoopid."

Boy, lose your manhood and your name in one fell swoop. That had to be
a rough day. Soon, Stoopid took to jumping on the kitchen counter.
Jody tried spraying him with water, but he just looked at her as if to
say, "Whad'ja do that for?!" Jodi then mixed the water with vinegar
and squirted it at the cat. He licked it up. Vinegar, I told her, is a
"gateway drug," paving the way to "harder drugs" like Pine-Sol and
Scubbing Bubbles. The cat proved me right, and soon advanced to
licking soap. Jodi has to lock him in the bathroom so she can mop the
kitchen floor. It isn't that he likes to chase the mop. He likes to
drink the bleach water. If she sets him loose before the floor is dry,
he'll get up to Mach 2 and slide across the floor - and lick the
bleach from his moist paws. The bathroom jail idea didn't work.
Stoopid learned how to open the cabinet doors and pry the cap off the
Windex. Mmmm. Windex. One day, Jodi came home to find her cat sitting
in middle of the living room - surrounded by little piles of fur he'd
pulled from his body. Another day, she was cleaning the wall when the
rag snagged on something ... She pulled the something from the wall.
It was one of Stoopid's canine teeth. The cat was eating the wall.

The last stop was when Jodi caught him dining on a hot/cold packs. The
cat was an bonafide addict.

One veterinarian suggested Stoopid make an appointment with a pet
psychologist and work on a 10-step program to end his addiction to the
chemicals with which he was poisoning his body.

Others suggested Jodi throw Stoopid in jail and throw away the key.
You just can't have a wild element like him running amok in the
neighborhood, breaking into peoples' houses to steal money to support
his bleach habit. Eventually, however, Jodi had to put Stoopid to
sleep; he was suffering from liver failure. No kidding! I'd have liver
failure, too, if I were munching on walls and drinking bleach like a
drunken sailor. Had she caught his addictions early enough, she could
have captured the little addict and shown him the finer points of a
high-grade catnip - followed by a soy milk chaser.

Jodi's learned a valuable lesson. She built a fence to prevent Bernie
from bringing home new pals.