EDITOR'S NOTE: SEX, DRUGS, & TECHNO MUSIC

If the topic is illegal drugs, then a little candor is in order: I first
smoked dope late one spring afternoon in the seventh grade, on a shady
corner of the playground behind good old St. Mary's grammar school in New
Monmouth, New Jersey. (Bless me, father, for I did sin.) I didn't get high
that day, though I remember the weird sensation of taking my first hit off
a joint while squinting across the playground at a cement statue of the
Virgin Mary. Her arms were outstretched, her palms were turned upward, and
her eyes were cast toward heaven in what struck me as a display of
exasperation with the bad conduct she was witnessing.

After that precocious experience, I didn't experiment with drugs again
until I was in college. By then, I was more adventurous and after long days
of studying (really), I tore through pretty much whatever was at hand: pot
and alcohol mostly, but also acid, mescaline, Ecstasy, mushrooms, coke, and
meth. Why? Partly in earnest pursuit of expanded, even "cosmic,"
consciousness. (I'd read a lot of Aldous Huxley and Herman Hesse - bless me
again, father.) But mostly I did drugs because they were fun and I liked
the way I felt when I was high.

After college, I continued to engage in similar bouts of recreational drug
use. As I've grown older, and especially as I've become a parent, such
moments have become increasingly rare. That's mostly because of time: Work
and family take precedence over what might be called optional leisure-time
experiences. Indeed, for exactly the same reasons, I don't-alas-exercise as
much as I used to.

I recount all this neither to boast of an unsavory pedigree nor to confess
to dark, personal demons. In fact, there's little extraordinary in such
biographical material: According to the federal government's latest
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, which tallies the frequency and
types of drug use, about 39 percent of Americans 12 years and older-some 87
million people-said they had used illegal drugs at least once; about 11
percent - 25 million people reported using drugs in the past year. What's
more, drug use typically climbs during adolescence, peaks in the late teens
and early 20s, and then begins a long decline, interrupted only by a slight
uptick among 40-44-year-olds (something to look forward to, I suppose).

I mention my drug use as a way of introducing several stories in this issue
that take a sharply critical look at the War on Drugs, that $40 billion
annual effort by government to keep people from using certain "illicit"
substances. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum's "Sex, Drugs & Techno Music" (page
26) demonstrates how recent stories about the drug Ecstasy tell us more
about long standing social anxieties regarding sex and youth than they do
about today's kids. In "Battlefield Conversions" (page 36), National
Correspondent Michael W. Lynch talks with a former police chief, a former
federal drug agent, and a California Superior Court judge and learns why
they've turned their backs on the drug war. Finally, in "A Splendid Little
Drug War" (page 63), Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin explores how drug
policy has thoroughly perverted U.S. relations with Latin America.

These are very different stories, but they have this in common: They
recognize that drug prohibition is underwritten by the sense that drug
users are strange, alien beings-"others" who are out of control and must be
stopped, for their good and ours. Each of these pieces underscores that in
fact, the opposite is more likely to be true: It's the people prosecuting
the drug war who need to be stopped the sooner, the better.

Nick Gillespie