CZAR WARS

You can't win an argument with the drug czar.

I found that out fast this month when John Walters, the federal
government's tireless, full-time propagandist in the War on Drugs, met
for an edgy but civil hour of debate with Trib editors and reporters.

Czar Walters, whose official title is director of National Drug
Control Policy, came to town as part of his national campaign to
debunk the latest crisis of the government's never-ending drug war --
"the myth of harmless marijuana."

Later that day, he would tell students at Highlands High School in
Natrona Heights that pot is not a soft drug that deserves to be
decriminalized or legalized, but a dangerous, addictive scourge that
is increasingly destroying the brains and bodies of teenagers.

I'm sure Czar Walters thought he would be in friendly territory at the
Trib.

But after his opening remarks, in which he summarized at great length
how his office planned to carry out its presidential mandate to cut
drug use in America 10 percent in two years and 25 percent in five, he
quickly discovered he was behind enemy lines.

No one laughed out loud or was rude. But none of us was buying much of
what the czar was selling -- especially the part about how marijuana
is now apparently a greater threat to the Republic than al-Qaida,
Saddam Hussein or Al Sharpton combined.

Dimitri Vassilaros, my fellow lovable libertarian, and I made the
standard anti-prohibitionist complaints about the heavy cost of the
drug war in dollars and lost civil liberties and imprisoned nonviolent
drug offenders.

But we aging journalists were no match for a five-star drug general.
He is smart, competent and blessed with a likable, un-czarlike manner.
After months of campaigning, he carries all the government facts,
studies, anti-legalization arguments and official policy statements in
his head -- and his heart. To back him up, he travels with two
assistants and a pile of official blue information packets stamped
with "Executive Office of the President."

In the end, it didn't matter what we serfs believed. The czar had not
come to debate drug policy. He doesn't believe debate is even
possible. He thinks the government's side -- which I would argue is
mindless, hysterical, absolutist, puritanical, inconsistent, cruel,
totalitarian and embarrassing -- is always right and the other side's
arguments have no credibility.

Walters accepts the results of no health study -- no matter how new or
reputable -- that doesn't find marijuana to be dangerous, addictive or
a gateway to heroin and crack. He is quick to discredit or disbelieve
the recent poll results in Time magazine and elsewhere that show
ever-higher majorities of Americans say marijuana should be
decriminalized.

I'm heartened by those polls. I'm also encouraged to see that 74
percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center agree with me
and my 84-year-old non-pot-smoking mother that we're losing our
30-year War on (some) Drugs.

Like we eventually did with Vietnam and Prohibition, someday we will
look back at the War on Drugs and see we had been waging a costly war
that we never should have started, that was fought stupidly and did
more to harm society than help it.

Czar Walters, of course, would buy none of this defeatist talk. He
insisted to us that the war is going well -- except, he said, that we
need a few billion dollars more for treatment and for helping the
Colombians fight the cartels and for beefing up interdiction by the
Coast Guard.

And except that marijuana is much more powerful and is addicting more
of our teens than ever. And except that you can buy drugs in cities
like Pittsburgh on the same corners they've been sold on for the last
30 years. And except that high school kids have more trouble buying a
pack of Winstons than a bag of pot.

We lost our argument with the czar, just as the decriminalizers and
legalizers lost two days later when voters in Nevada, Arizona and Ohio
rejected ballot issues to approve marijuana for medical use,
decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana or put
nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of jail.

Czar Walters is probably still cheering these victories. But he should
celebrate while he can. The slow, steady revolution of responsible,
sensible drug reform bubbling up from some of the country's most
conservative states is not going to go away.

Fewer and fewer Americans are such dopes when it comes to supporting
federal drug policy, especially as it regards marijuana, a drug that
polls say about half of Americans have tried and nearly 72 percent
believe possession of small amounts of should be punished by fines,
not jail time.

Czar Walters and his allies paint drug reformers as threats to the
public health and safety, as coddlers of criminals, or as
irresponsible dopers who are willing to sacrifice the future of the
country's youth for the selfish right to get high.

I'm 55 and don't use or sell drugs. I won't lie and say I never did -
or that I don't think my kids never will. But I see the growing drug
reform movement as a sign that common sense is not completely dead in
America.

I'd argue most reform leaders and their followers are responsible
citizens who are concerned about individual freedom or interested in
minimizing the serious harm done to society by the prohibition of
drugs that 16 million people demand and the worst elements of society
are willing to supply.

But who the reform leaders are, or what their real motives for
de-escalating the drug war are, is not the point. The War on Drugs is
wrong. A majority of ordinary Americans know it, even if their
political leaders don't or are terrified to admit it. And the sooner
our government declares defeat and ends it, the better.

We said all that, though not so clearly, to Czar Walters, who looked
suspiciously relieved when his time in the Trib torture chamber was
up. I didn't set out to make him uncomfortable, and maybe we didn't.
Maybe he's used to being argued with. I sure hope so.

When I shook his hand good-bye, I made a point of telling him
something else. "Please tell the president that the War on Drugs is
shameful and unbecoming a free society."

I didn't deliver that message to be nasty or try to change his mind. I
did it so he and his boss in the White House will know that the
dissenters in the drug war include stone-sober grandfathers like me.