Okay! Enough is enough, I'm good and tired of billions of dollars going into this war on drugs some of which came out of my pocket. I'm tired of the pretext that allows an infinite string of powerful people to ignore the devastation caused by this war and our total inability to keep up.

Garcia's Navy

A dozen or so cigar boats is an all-purpose flotilla useful for work on weekdays and available for fun on the weekends. Add to those cigar boats half a dozen or so submarines and now you've got a navy. What I'm talking about is this. The July 19th issue of Time Magazine arrived today. Item 3 of the World Briefing left me dismayed and disheartened, as it told of new technology rushing ever growing tonnage of illegal drugs to intersect with cold hard cash on the city streets of North America. Ecuadorian police managed to confiscate a submarine owned and operated by the Colombian cartel. 100 feet long, operating at depths up to 65 feet this submersible vehicle made out of fiberglass was capable of carrying 10,000 pounds of drugs to market under the surface of the broad Pacific or in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oh sure Mick and now you have a bridge to sell us right? It's true. We are losing the war on drugs to a competitor that is better focused and better equipped than we are to carry on this conflict. And it's all because we refuse to change our focus and do the one thing it would take to remove the economic incentive that fuels the traffic.

Economic incentive? What's he talkin' about?

One of the competitors in this so-called war sees it as a holy crusade to save our children and our society from the evils of narcotics. The other side sees it as business, pure and simple. You identify a need, you satisfy that need, money changes hands and life goes on. Take a guess at which side is winning the war on drugs. It's a businessman of course with superior focus and a simpler task at hand they just keep pumping out the product. Satisfying the customer and collecting the rewards of a job well done. Yet it would be so easy to look at it their way. We're good at business. We practically invented it. Take the profits out of the endeavor it dries up and goes away.

And when we take the profits of the business? We simply make it legal. It shouldn't be that hard. No official can afford to come out in favor of extending the war on drugs. So here's how it would go:

1) January 1, 2011, Pres. Obama signs legislation repealing the laws controlling any use and sale of these drugs illegal.
2) January 2-7 citizens who never tried these drugs take the opportunity to sample their drug of choice.
3) On Monday, January 10 all those experimenters come back to work clean and sober and the real war on drugs commences.
4) State governments license the production of drugs at the local level.
5) State governments license wholesale and retail distribution of the drugs.
6) Federal and state authorities release all victimless crime convicts.
7) Pres. Obama signs a short-term unemployment and retraining program for unemployed drug workers and convicts.
8) Congress passes a law setting up a drug war recovery fund. The entire balance of the fund is placed in the hands of Señor Jimenez Garcia, former CEO of the Colombian cartel in the form of a loan at 1% interest.
9) The loan is dedicated to retrofitting the submarine fleet for use in the cruise industry and the principal is repayed in just over a year.
10) December 25, 2011, Admiral Gonzalez Gonzalez Chaluppa Chihuahua, Adm. of the cartel fleet is cashiered from the cartel navy and incarcerated on the island of Elba in the South Atlantic where he spends the rest of his days serving high tea and pretending to be his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte.
11) On New Year's rocking Eve 2012, the Mad Hatter the March Hare and Sarah Palin crawl into a bottle of champagne as the former governor of Alaska tells the story of how she single-handedly won the war on drugs.
12) President Obama's approval ratings fall to 2%.