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It's hard to watch network TV for more than 10 minutes
without being assaulted by one of those I'm tougher on
dope than the other guy
messages.
Bill Clinton says he's working to put more people in
prison for longer terms, and to test more people for urine
purity. I get this vision of The Controlled Substance
Metabolite Detection Act of 1997,
requiring sensors to
be placed in every toilet and urinal in America. The
sensors will transmit to a central monitoring computer;
when an improper chemical is detected in the effluent,
local enforcement authorities will notified so they can
kick down your door with jackboots.
Bob Dole says Clinton isn't doing enough. The president
hasn't provided moral leadership for the War on Drugs.
Clinton is just standing by while Hollywood and the media
in general are glamorizing drugs in movies like
Trainspotting.
Just like Dole, I'm perfectly capable of discussing a movie I haven't seen. My daughters saw it on an airplane last summer. Their capsule review: Good movie, if you can translate the thick Scots brogue, and the famous toilet diving scene is a more potent anti-heroin message than a decade of DARE programs.
Dole went to school back when we had some rigorous educational standards in this country. In the good old days, they studied the works of dead white European males like Homer, whose Odyssey is one of the fundamental works of Western literature.
And what do we find there? While Odysseus is careering around the Mediterranean, his son Telemachus leaves his Ithaca home to search for news of his absentee father.
The lad arrives at Sparta, where he gets a royal welcome from King Menelaus and Queen Helen (who had been Helen of Troy before Odysseus and hundreds of other Acheans went to battle to get her back). And, when Telemachus starts sobbing about his missing father, Helen spikes his wine with opium so he'll feel better.
So here we have this beautiful woman, former mistress of Paris, supplying wine and drugs to an impressionable young man who's been raised in a single-parent household. If Hollywood put this in a movie, Dole would be on the stump denouncing it as another step toward the ruin of the republic-- yet it's something he must have read in school, and presumably it didn't corrupt him.
There's also the presumption that anyone who ever touched any of these forbidden substances is forever incapable of holding public office.
Consider this account from a young man who escaped from
custody: My escape must be known at dawn. Pursuit would
be immediate.... the compass and map which might have
guided me, the opium tablets and meat lozenges which should
have sustained me, were in my friend's pocket....
This guy needed opium tablets to sustain him. He was obviously unfit to hold office here, so it's a good thing he was a citizen of Great Britain, where they might be speaking German now if they'd been as picky as we are.
The account is from Winston Churchill; in 1899 he was a war correspondent in South Africa, the Boers captured him and his opium tablets, and he managed a successful escape.
There's another presumption that America was somehow a drug-free continent until about 1965. In Colorado, of all places, we should know better -- civilized visitors to our mining camps often remarked on the abundance of opium dens.
All over the country, without any help from Hollywood,
patent medicines contained up to 95 percent cocaine, and
there was Coca-Cola with the stimulating properties of
the coca plant.
Heroin (originally, like aspirin, a
trademark of Bayer) was a common constituent of cough
syrup.
And somehow our great-grandparents managed to survive, hold down regular jobs, liberate Cuba, conquer the Philippines and raise families.
If presidential candidates truly cared about the influence of drugs on America, they'd quit ignoring those stories about the CIA using crack sales to fund the Contras. They'd call for investigations.
Not that this sordid story is any novelty -- years ago,
I read a book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast
Asia.
The CIA had an airline, Air America, which hauled
opium, purchased from the Montagnards to buy their goodwill
so they wouldn't throw in with the commies.
Our government may say it's against drugs, but when there's a choice between protecting Americans from the scourge or supporting some Third World thug, the thug is generally more important than American citizens.
But we don't hear any of this from either major-party nominee. They keep blasting away, spreading hatred and ignorance, ignoring anything within a day's ride of rational thought.
Some people take drugs to escape reality. Modern politicians are a little different. They promote drug wars to escape reality.
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