Drug demagoguery - government control of drug traffic

National Review, June 10, 1988

Drug Demagoguery

BOTH THE Senate and the House, by huge margins, have passed legislation described by the Washington Post as "the most mindless" yet in "this admittedly still-young election year." Whipped up by war-on-drugs rhetoric, Congress has at last found a role for American military power: intercepting, by air and sea, incoming drug shipments.

The pilots and the sailors will of course take their orders, and they will intercept some yachts and some planes along our southern coastline, but the Defense Department doesn't like it for a minute. The vast effort required, the Pentagon thinks, is bound to fail. The War on Drugs, the War in Vietnam, the War on Poverty--these all have had something in common: the absence of a coherent and reasonable strategy. The military believe that drug policing will divert their assets from their proper role around the world, and that these assets are already stretched thin. They argue that the drug traffic is like quicksilver and will flow in through countless unpluggable openings. Then there is the added problem that fighting forces are not trained in police tehniques, but are trained to shoot and kill and have never heard of Miranda.

It was a bad idea whose time had come, probably under the auspices of Jesse Jackson, who has proclaimed drugs to be the real enemy of our national security. When Robert Walpole heard the London church bells ringing to celebrate the onset of the War of Jenkins's Ear, the aging prime minister remarked, "They're ringing the bells now, but soon they'll be wringing their hands." He was correct.