How about bankrupting our enemies and attacking THEM for a change, instead of bankrupting ourselves and our criminal justice system, while attacking our own citizens?

As deeply misguided an exercise of liberty as personal recreational drug use may be, it does not rise to the level of a threat to me (or anyone else), until it is criminalized by government.

If the argument that I own myself and it's nobody's damn business what I choose to ingest doesn't impress you, how about - funding terrorism and corrupting entire nations, to say nothing of the corruption of our own institutions and sacrifice of entire neighborhoods to this insane god-like quest?

Any harebrained movement that doesn't have access to oil, it seems, uses our oppressive drug-prohibition lunacy to finance their aggression.

Here we have an unholy alliance between conservatives and libs that conspires to make the most despicable thugs on the planet fabulously wealthy, while simultaneously bankrupting our criminal justice system and violating fundamental, self-evident natural rights.

While the actual commodities, the drugs, are worth about as much per pound as soybeans, the risk of incarceration or death due to the criminalization of those drugs adds a tremendous overhead cost, multiplying the cost on the street a thousand-fold. Essentially a "service fee" to hedge the risk.

We could far more easily contain the various movements using this elicit source of funds (mostly communists, would-be dictators, Taliban and other Islamo-nazis - all enemies of America), empty perhaps a majority of our jail cells, unburden the courts of about half of their case load, and reduce the ill effects of drugs on our society by removing the stigma and cost to its victims, while reducing the financial incentive to pushers to enlist new addicts by eliminating most of their profit incentive.

While I harbor no illusions that these tremendous savings might be returned to the taxpayer, at least they might be expended in a manner that does not produce the devastation currently visited on humanity by American drug policy.

Drug abuse has tragically impacted my family directly. I am no advocate of recreational drug use. But these quixotic, destructive, futile efforts to use the coercive and corrupting power of govt to interfere in a private, admittedly self-destructive, exercise of personal liberty are causing 100 times the damage they are trying, but failing abysmally, to remedy.

Conservatives sound a lot like liberals on this issue. The spectacular failure of this celebrated "War on Drugs" to achieve any of its goals, while actually exacerbating the destructive power of drugs and their purveyors, seems to evaporate in the face of the "moral force" of the good intentions that inspired it. Do good intentions really trump the actual horrible, if unintended, consequences of a policy? Isn't that eerily similar to the libs "War on Poverty" rhetoric? At least we found the moral backbone to reverse some of the welfare state. Our grandparents found the moral backbone to repeal a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT! to undo the exact same damage caused by alcohol prohibition.

Yet, here we find ourselves in 21st century America, ignoring the natural rights of man, to wage a mindlessly stupid, demonstrably futile crusade against human nature, while blithely ignoring the laws of supply and demand, as well as our own recent history with regard to the 1920's Prohibition debacle. It's absolutely stunning!

Mr. Novak, with all due (and considerable) respect, you are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Could we please, finally, steer ourselves clear of the iceberg to which we are plotting our course at 40 knots? All it would require would be a renewed embrace of liberty.