As I mentioned in my earlier discussion about Proposition 22, California's budget system is messed-up-wacky. The 1966 overhaul of the state constitution inserted a requirement that two-thirds of the legislators must agree on a budget in order for the budget to pass. Combine that with a redistricting system that has, for the last thirty years, been designed to keep everyone exactly where they are, and you have the makings of a legislative deadlock. All it takes is one-third plus one, and the budget process comes to a halt. This has led to late budgets in 25 out of the last 30 years and compromises that were made not because they were good, but because they were expedient.

Proposition 25

California's budget problems won't be resolved until 1978's Prop. 13 is repealed. But Proposition 25 is halfway there. It replaces the two-thirds requirement for approving a budget with a simple majority. It further adds a penalty to the legislature for not having a budget on time: until the budget is passed, legislators won't get paid, and they won't have any of their expenses paid for. This is a pretty good inducement to get a budget passed, don't you think? It has been suggested to me that this is unfair to poorer legislators and places power in the hands of wealthier legislators, which may be true theoretically, and may have been actually true if we kept the two-thirds requirement. But a simple majority is easy to find in the General Assembly, and if they can't come up with that for a budget, then they've got bigger problems than not getting paid.

Here's Some Fun Scare Tactics

I was perusing the "No on 25" website and found some fun scare-ya statements designed to perpetuate fear about Prop. 25. Here's my favorite:

Eliminates the Constitutional right of voters to use the referendum to force a vote to repeal bad legislation or taxes disguised as fees.

This is an outrageous lie. It's "outrageous" because any literate person can read the text of Prop. 25 and discover that it absolutely does not do anything remotely close to that. Prop. 25 is, of course, supported by Chevron and the California Chamber of Commerce. Vote yes on Prop. 25.

Proposition 26

This is a companion proposition in the sense that it also deals with taxes. According to Prop. 26's supporters -- who are exactly the same groups that are against Prop. 25 -- politicians in Sacramento are getting around Howard Jarvis' Prop. 13 by disguising higher taxes as "fees." The problem is that the definition of a "fee" is different from that of a "tax." A fee is a charge levied upon a particular group of people and used to pay for public programs either in support of those people or to fix problems those people have created. A vehicle registration fee is a charge levied only on people who register a car in California; the fee goes to pay for the maintenance of the roads on which those vehicles drive. So it's vehicle owners paying for the maintenance of their roads.

Prop. 26 is incredibly sneaky: it mandates that any "fees" passed by the legislature be subject to the same two-thirds majority requirement that all other taxes are. While Prop. 26's supporters maintain that "taxpayers" are being tricked into paying higher taxes, not all taxpayers are within Prop. 26's scope. The legislative analyst notes:

The change in the definition of taxes would not affect most user fees, property development charges, and property assessments. This is because these fees and charges generally comply with Proposition 26's requirements already, or are exempt from its provisions.

So who would be affected by Prop. 26?

Generally, the types of fees and charges that would become taxes under the measure are ones that government imposes to address health, environmental, or other societal or economic concerns.

Ah, it's all so clear! Prop. 26's supporters, who are gigantic corporations, are tired of paying regulatory fees. They don't want to have to pay to have the state clean up their messes or mitigate the environmental problems created by their business. Their analysis includes the old bromide that, if the legislature increases business' regulatory fees, those businesses will just pass the cost on to consumers. While this might be true, the businesses ignore the agency of that decision: the state does not mandate such a transfer; businesses choose to make such a transfer. The other argument is that the taxes take care of what economists call externalities: side effects of doing business that are not factored into the price of a product; e.g., pollution, which is hard to quantify. Ostensibly, the cost of, say, gasoline should take into account the environmental damage caused by drilling for oil, refining oil, and burning gasoline. A tax on gasoline merely corrects that error so that the price of gas reflects not only the cost of the gas itself, but also the cost to the environment.

The legislative analyst isn't fooled: Prop. 26 would just permit businesses to engage in unsafe or detrimental business practices without paying higher regulatory fees. Mom and Pop's hardware store would be unaffected. Chevron would be. Vote no on Prop. 26.

Statewide, 12 percent of all property tax dollars are diverted into these agencies - $6 billion is earmarked for developers and can't go to schools, police, fire services or the poor.

Counties (which by and large oppose Prop. 22) have lost millions to redevelopment. Los Angeles County alone has seen $45 million drained away, not available for cash-strapped vital services. Prop. 22 would lock these cash grabs into the state Constitution.

The first in a series of articles on California's upcoming November ballot initiatives. California allows citizens to legislate by way of an initiative system that bypasses the General Assembly to pass laws. As we have seen in the past, the initiative system allows a simple majority of voters to do really dumb things, like take rights away from people just because they feel like it. California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George has said that it is this initiative system that makes California's government "dysfunctional." Hopefully these articles will give Californians more information than can be found in apocalyptic television ads.

Proposition 19 would, if passed, legalize the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana and permit the commercial sale of up to an ounce of marijuana. Prop. 19's inclusion in this election at all is the result of a perfect storm of crime and debt. Californians living on the southern border are intimately aware of the increasing violence caused by Mexican drug gangs; the only way to put such gangs out of business would be to eliminate the necessity for an underground trade in drugs by legalizing drugs. At the same time, California, like the rest of the states, is still reeling from the financial crisis. Assemblyman Mark Leno estimated that California can earn at least $1 billion annually in taxing marijuana sales. Sounds great!

But there are three groups of people who don't like Prop. 19: 

The anti-drug people, obviously. These are the people who would much rather continue with the status quo, which has worked swimmingly over the last thirty years. Put them together with the abstinence-only-education proponents, and you've got the cure for America's problems.

Other anti-drug people do make points that reasonable people can disagree with; for example, what about companies that perform drug testing? Many companies, often in situations where heavy machinery is involved, perform drug testing at random or after accidents in order to limit their own liability. I have always maintained that the answer to this question is to come up with a better test to determine whether a person has used marijuana any time in, say, the last hour rather than the last month. A Breathalyzer can determine the blood alcohol content, and through that, whether a person is drunk at the time the test is administered. Surely California, with its ingenuity, can solve a simple problem.

The medical marijuana people. You might be saying to yourself, "What? Shouldn't they be natural allies for Prop. 19?" Not so much. The medical marijuana people misapprehend the language of Prop. 19 and conclude that it would restrict the number of marijuana plants a patient or a patient's caregiver can grow and that it would pile more taxes on top of dispensaries.

I say "misapprehend" because nowhere in the language of Prop. 19 does it say that it would supersede laws for medical production and sale. Prop. 19 concerns commercial production and sale. Prop. 19 adds a new Article 5 to the California Health and Safety Code, and all of the language of Prop. 19 is directed at this Article. The laws created by Proposition 215 remain in force, and nothing in the language of Prop. 19 says otherwise.

The pro-marijuana people. The people who smoke marijuana recreationally - which, as nearly as I can tell, is all of California - have two arguments. First, the economic one: marijuana prices will go up once producers have to pay taxes. Prop. 19 permits, but does not require, a municipality to tax marijuana sales and production. Thus, it is conceivable that a black market in tax-free marijuana flowing from jurisdictions without taxes to those with taxes would offset the potential state tax revenue, right?

Well, there's no guarantee that prices would go up. Since marijuana has never been legal for commercial sale, we don't know what would happen to the prices. There is every indication that prices would go down, as suppliers entered the industry, forcing the price downward in spite of the taxes. We also have the ever-present example of alcohol prohibition: during Prohibition, the price of liquor shot way up, which is why organized crime got into the business of providing bootleg hooch: it was extremely lucrative, since the demand remained the same, but the supply curve shifted left, causing a decrease in supply and an increase in the equilibrium price. Today, alcohol is taxed, and we accept it, but very few of us consider the option of making our own liquor because we don't want to pay $15 for a bottle of whiskey. It's convenience. And certainly, the ability of people to grow their own marijuana makes black market sales easier in a way that liquor doesn't, but there is the convenience issue again. The truth is, we really don't know what will happen to the existing marijuana price structure.

Their second argument is the moral one: once marijuana becomes legal, Big Business will enter into the picture (just like it did with the "organic" movement, which was as much an anti-corporate political movement as it was an agricultural one). This argument is moderately irrelevant, given that there is already a significant infrastructure in "local" marijuana production that companies like Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds - excuse me, Altria - don't yet have in place. That, coupled with the questionable legality of marijuana on a national level, makes it unlikely that Big Business will enter into the market any time soon.

Bottom line: you don't need to believe these people. Prop. 19 is only the start of marijuana legalization. It's extremely broad and only lays out a framework by which marijuana can be legalized. Most of the real work in creating policies and tax structures will be left up to the municipalities that choose to benefit from the legalization. If it ever happens, that is. With marijuana still illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act, law-watchers are anxious to see what will happen if the federal government decides to assert its authority once Prop. 19 passes (which it most likely will). Nevertheless, Prop. 19 is not scary and it won't hurt medical marijuana dispensaries or patients. Or anyone else for that matter.

While I agree that its bad to burn Korans, this frame of logic is rather cowardly. Muslims never think, "Dont do X or it will anger the West," but we always say "Dont do X or it will anger Muslims." 

Speaking of which [intellectual consistency], the comparison to the ground zero mosque site is very apt. I'm betting that manoy [sic] or most of those making such a clamor against the idiot Florida preacher support the imam's desire and plan to build that mosque, though it is as great an affront to many Americans as the koran burning is to Moslems. Not much intellectual consistency there, either.

Bad idea to burn the Koran. Worse idea to capitulate to Islamic threats of violence.

A few years ago, the police -- under the watchful eye of notoriously anti-homeless Mayor Gavin Newsom (think about that while you're voting for lieutenant governor; he's also pro-landlord and anti-tenant) -- began periodically sweeping Golden Gate Park, issuing so-called quality of life citations, which penalized violators for such activities as "public camping," which are technically applicable to anyone, but are really targeted at the homeless. (Seriously, how many people with houses set up their tents in urban parks?) As with the sit/lie ordinance on this year's ballot, the law is being enforced for a very particular infraction for a very particular group, and for a very particular reason.

The reason? Homeless people don't look pretty. The socially-conscious-yet-bourgeois citizens of San Francisco don't like looking at the homeless or being bothered by them as they walk their dogs, jog with their iPods, or attend their Outside Lands festivals. The Examiner would have us believe that the existence of homeless people in the Park is a safety issue, but in two separate pieces, it has provided only the same two flimsy examples each time: a homeless man was found beaten to death at Kezar Stadium, and unleashed dogs owned by a homeless person attacked two people in the park, sending them to the hospital. Both regrettable incidents, but neither limited in causation to the homeless, and certainly not related to the homeless being somewhere at night.

Nevertheless, it is for these reasons -- and only these reasons, so far -- that the Examiner is urging the creation of a policy of closing Golden Gate Park at 11 PM. Such an ordinance would make it misdemeanor trespassing to be in the park past that time. Currently, quality of life citations are mere administrative violations no more worrisome than traffic tickets, but misdemeanors can bring jail time with them. Did I mention that there could be exemptions for things like walking your dog in the park past 11? You know, the kinds of things that socially-conscious-yet-bourgeois people do, ensuring that homeless people, and only homeless people, will be trapped in this net. The purpose of the 11 PM restriction would not be because the city has some knowledge or belief that especially violent activities happen at night; it's an arbitrary element thrown in as a mechanism by which to arrest the homeless. If you live somewhere, you're going to sleep there, and you're going to sleep at night. So if you're in the park at night, it must be because you live there (with the exceptions noted above). And the only reason you'd live in Golden Gate Park is if you were homeless. And if you're homeless, we don't want you there.

At least they're no longer being coy about it.

What will be the effect of such a rule? Curiously, the Examiner's editorial board appears not to communicate with its reporters. Nine pages away, a staff writer describes the budget woes facing city departments, including the Sheriff's Department, which is "probably the most vulnerable to state budget cuts." Why is that? "More money would be needed if there's an increase in the jail population as a result of reductions in the state Department of Corrections budget," according to Sheriff Michael Hennessey. But nowhere did anyone put together that an increase in the jail population due to heightened penalties for "trespassers" to Golden Gate Park could also be a problem. Never mind that; the Examiner editorial board thinks that "the realistic threat of immediate removal to a holding cell" is just what the doctor ordered for the chronically homeless. But the budgetary effect should bother the allegedly conservative Examiner, which, to be intellectually consistent, should also care about the fiscal effects of such things.

So they could just as easily leave the park. No problem there. But where will they go? Anecdotal evidence -- which is by no means statistically significant -- suggests that they will migrate west, to the Sunset district. A friend of mine who has lived there her entire life observed that an increased prevalence of homeless people has made the area less safe. Perhaps this lends credence to the Examiner's belief that homeless people are inherently dangerous, but it also lends credence to the fact that such an ordinance wouldn't solve any problem except the problem of where, specifically, the homeless are located. Jail them for being in Golden Gate Park, and they'll just move somewhere else. And we'll have the same problem -- somewhere else (unless that somewhere else happens to be a place that the Birkenstock crowd already doesn't care about, like Hunter's Point; then, it's okay).

I was only half-listening each time, but I heard a couple times on the radio the assertion that what Americans want for health insurance is choice.

Well, here's one American who doesn't particularly want choice, or, more exactly, choice isn't something I want to need. What I want is what I had for my adult life up to retirement: decent coverage I didn't have to worry about.

As a student, I had access to student health services. I was convinced the student health service at the University of Illinois, Urbana -- as opposed to the excellent veterinary-care clinic -- was part of an AMA plot to turn young Americans against socialized medicine. Still, the health service was good enough for my undergraduate needs, and when I got older and started earning a bit of money, I supplemented the health service with Carle Clinic, at the time, a real HMO: a low-cost health-maintenance organization.

As a university faculty member and indirect employee of first the State of Illinois and then the State of Ohio, I participated in university health plans. I got insurance automatically, as part of my compensation package. The coverage was good; the co-pays reasonable -- and when an insurance company bureaucrat got between me and my physician, I had the phone number of a university bureaucrat whose primary job was running interference for university employees trying to get payments from our insurance company.

The system was imperfect, but pretty efficient.

Shopping, period, is not my idea of a good time -- yeah, I'm a guy -- and high-risk shopping for something complicated and important is my idea of a very bad time. Shopping was also not part of my job; nor was arguing with 20-something punk insurance company flunkies. Time spent on health insurance would have been time I wasn't doing my job; as far as my employer and I were concerned, it would have been nonproductive, wasted time.

Now I'm retired, and my time is my own; but I'm close enough to death to really value that time, and I'm more anxious than ever to avoid shopping for insurance, reading policies, and/or fighting with corporate "minicrats" professionally obligated to try to deny coverage.

Fortunately, I've got Medicare -- or, I think I do (I forgot to make quarterly payments automatic). And I have a pension and a secondary policy through my pension plan.

All Americans should have it as good, or better. Ideally, from this point of view, we'd have a National Health Service, or at least single-payer health coverage. In any event, what I want and what I think we all need isn't particularly choice but one system that is flexible, simple, automatic, and -- including considerations of nonwasted time -- efficient.

Richard D. Erlich is professor emeritus at Miami University, currently living in Ventura County, California.

To put the matter in an old-fashioned, satiric, but nonsexist way, AMERICANS ARE PUPPIES!!! Putting that assertion into respectable language: Few Americans are willing to take personal risks, even small ones, for liberty and decency.

The Declaration of Independence lists life as the first of the "unalienable rights" that we humans establish governments to preserve, and the Preamble to the US Constitution lists defense as one of the purposes of the US government.

Still, it was and remains misleading when Presidents Bush and Obama put quite so much emphasis on their job to protect the American people. The President is commander in chief of the military forces of the United States, and the faithful execution of the Presidential office includes protecting Americans, but the President isn't commander-in-Chief of the United States, and the President's first job isn't to protect Americans but America: "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" (Article II).

The Declaration of Independence has life as a right, but follows it with rights to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness." We humans establish governments to for protection but also to secure liberty and to create the political space to pursue our own good in our own ways. If you want self-protection as the central justification for government, don't go to Thomas Jefferson but to Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan (1651).

Without relying on arguments from divine authority or restricting himself to kings, Hobbes establishes something like Divine Right for any sovereign. Hobbes gives us a creation myth where to protect themselves from each other -- to get out of a state of nature where human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" -- humans established governments to end a war of all against all. As the price of safety, they surrendered all rights except protection.

Going a bit beyond Hobbes -- If protection is the over-riding goal, most Americans would do best in an absolutist police-state. If protection trumps all other concerns, Americans should have no qualms about using torture if, on balance, it seems expedient to do so to protect Americans.

"Freedom isn't free" as the truism goes, and neither is decency. If we wish to preserve the liberty we inherited, we must be willing to take risks; if we wish to bequeath liberty to America's children, we must be willing to put those children at risk. If we're to behave decently and "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," including our Bill of Rights, we must take risks.

Let's say most of our Federal legislators are right and Americans are unwilling to imprison convicted or suspected terrorists even in maximum-security prisons in our area codes or maybe even time zones. Not even if that unwillingness would prohibit giving terrorist suspects trials. Not even if that unwillingness keeps Guantanamo open as a prison and a blot on America's reputation.

If we won't expose ourselves to even small risks, we are puppies, if not quite cowards, at least insufficiently valiant to live long as free and decent people.

Former Vice President Cheney says that a little torture saved many American lives. How is he so sure-- and how many lives? If we're talking hundreds of thousands of lives, I'd be willing to sacrifice decency and some American honor. I'm not a rigid ideologue nor so much with the Christians and classical Anarchists that I'd argue that evil should never be done to prevent greater evil; but I'm also not a total puppy. How many lives, Mr. Cheney, and how do you know?

President Obama talks about preventive detention of terrorist suspects we might not be able to convict even with military tribunals. For how long, such detention, Mr. President? How many men? What sort of precedent do we set for, say, "domestic terrorists" like environmental activists?

I can't believe we're risking lives in very large numbers in releasing long-held terrorism suspects into the United States -- not if the FBI tries to keep track of them and to use them to uncover terrorist cells. Not if their release decreases at least slightly the intensity of hatred for us.

I'm far from brave myself, but I'm willing to have a few more tightly-surveilled potential terrorists in the USA, to add to our home-grown, all-American variety (no, not environmentalist tree-spikers but more like the "Minute Men" who left the message, "Tell Erlich the cross-hairs are on the back of his neck").

Benjamin Franklin warned his contemporaries in 1759, "Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Preserving American liberty as enshrined in the Bill of Rights is worth taking risks and taking casualties, including civilian casualties. Preserving decency is worth equal sacrifice.

If we allow ourselves to do evil out of fear, we are puppies, and rabid puppies to boot.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor at Miami University, Oxford, OH, retired in Ventura County, California.

How wrong is torture? Sen. John McCain reminded us, in 2007 (when he was against torture before he was in favor of it), that some Japanese soldiers were executed after World War II for waterboarding American soldiers.

In today's New York Times, the FBI interrogator who interrogated (not tortured! Seriously; both the FBI and the U.S. military refused to engage in the torture the CIA willingly participated in) Abu Zubaydah refutes the Bush administration argument that torturing Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence:

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn't, or couldn't have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions -- all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

And, by the way, 24 is not real and torture doesn't work.

Former Massachusetts Governor and presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who for some reason is still asked his opinion about things, thinks that investigating Bush administration officials for their complicity in torture is just "partisanship." I suppose this means that mercilessly investigating Bill Clinton for eight years in order to get something, anything, to stick and then unsuccessfully impeaching him for perjury is ... justice?

Thankfully, Obama contradicted the statements of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs by saying that it's up to the Attorney General to decide whether or not to prosecute people for torture.

Paul Krugman connects the dots after eight years and discovers a Grand Unified Scandal going on in our name:

Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There's a word for this: it's evil.

According to Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, you can correlate the torture timeline with the events leading up to the Iraq War, providing support for the argument that torture was not used to prevent another terrorist attack, but was instead used to find support -- any support -- for an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. Former Vice President Cheney, however, has waffled on the issue of government secrecy. Once the champion of making sure the American people have no idea what their government is doing, Cheney instead wants the CIA to declassify memos showing how effective torture was. That makes it okay!

All of this revelation doesn't stop Fox News' Shepard Smith from putting his head in the sand. It's as though he's having a flashback to when he was eight years old and woke up in the middle of the night to find his mother replacing the tooth under his pillow with a dollar bill.

One more interesting observation: the Spanish government wants to prosecute six former Bush administration officials for holding and torturing five Spanish residents in Guantanamo Bay. If the U.S. government can lay claim to "extraordinary rendition," then why can't Spain order the kidnapping and rendition of such U.S. citizens as John Yoo and Jay Bybee?

But none of these revelations stop Roger Cohen from telling us to let bygones be bygones. Imagine if we told that to Simon Weisenthal? Germany still wants to have John Demjanjuk extradited to stand trial for crimes he committed as a prison guard during the Holocaust, despite his old age. The Justice Department retroactively revoked his U.S. citizenship because he lied about being a Nazi prison guard. Why don't they look forward, and not backward?

Before the Taliban take over more of Afghanistan and set their sights on Pakistan and its nuclear arms, before Mexico becomes an open battleground for the drug trade in the United States, before the State of California is nudged further toward bankruptcy because we can't afford room and board for a huge prison population, and before another generation of American young men of color find themselves more likely in prison than a university--before things get even worse, can we Americans finally have an adult conversation about drugs and drug policy?

Such a conversation might begin with a story I heard from a cop who had brought a truant schoolchild home to her mother. The girl had missed a lot of school because she was often drunk. The mother's reaction: "Well, at least she's not on drugs!"

The cop resisted the temptation to shake the mother and scream at her that her little girl was an alcoholic; the girl was on drugs and a drug addict: by any honest definitions of "drug" and "addict."

Honesty is a good place to start: alcohol is a drug, and so are nicotine, caffeine, Viagra, aspirin, antibiotics, and anabolic steroids.

Once in a literature class we needed a formal definition of "drug," and a student said a drug was a substance, often manipulated by people, that has a psychological and/or physiological effect when introduced into the body. I noted that such a definition would include even white sugar; the student replied only, "Well?"

He had a point. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, there's a reference to a "poor pennyworth of sugar-candy" that's both a snack and a drug to make one "long-winded" (3.3). In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W. Mintz has sugar as a "food-drug." And seeing sugar as a drug as well as food is useful for seeing how important drug production has been in the history of the Americas and for how long there's been an intimate connection among drugs, the state, and organized crime.

Sugar and molasses, and the sugar-product rum--along with tobacco--were crucial parts of the triangular commerce that had as its most notorious portion the trade in slaves from West Africa.

Many Americans were in the drug business from our beginning, and, by historical standards, the narco-crime lords of today are small-time hoods when put against evil on the scale of the slave-trade.

So we've got a culture heavily into drugs, a culture that has known sin, and we're going to have to deal with that--but we can deal with it.

A student who'd become a drug counselor asked me if I remembered the fears of a heroin epidemic when US troops came home from Vietnam. We had a fair number of soldiers who used heroin in 'Nam, and we'd been warned that many would bring their habit home.

There was no epidemic.

Heroin use was fairly common among troops in Vietnam because pain was common. The great majority of apparently addicted soldiers left their pain in Vietnam and with it their more powerful painkillers. If they came home to a decent neighborhood and a decent life, they left their drug as easily as people leave even more powerful painkillers when they leave the hospital. If the ex-soldiers came home to pain, in areas where heroin was easily available, then there was a good chance they'd go back on heroin.

As my ex-student taught me, it's never "The Addict" and "The Drug"--abstractions worse than useless--but real-world addicts with different metabolisms in complex social contexts interacting with a wide range of drugs.

With an honest definition of "drugs," we can look at history and sociology, and then take two important steps to deal with America's drug problems. First, we should lump drugs together and consider the role(s) of drugs in our society from aspirin to heroin to alcohol to antibiotics; and then we must very carefully distinguish among drugs and their uses and abuses.

Graham Nash notwithstanding, we cannot really "change the world-- /
Re-arrange the world"; but we can stop lying to ourselves about "A Drug-Free America" and get on with what can be done to minimize harm from drugs and maximize their usefulness.

In an earlier time of economic distress--and none too soon--America gave up on the capital "P" Prohibition of beverage alcohol; we can be equally smart about easing or eliminating many of our current prohibitions, however much Americans hate to quit, even when we're quitting banging our heads into walls.

We can, though (maybe) be smarter than the Americans who ended alcohol Prohibition. If we deal with psychoactive drugs as a group, within a broader consideration of drug use generally, I think we'll conclude that we can more than make up for any problems with legalizing drugs like marijuana and heroin if we forbid their advertising and marketing and apply similar prohibitions to alcohol and nicotine products. As funny as the Cheech and Chong routine is, it would be bad to have commercials touting, "Acapulco Gold Is Bad-Ass Weed"; even so, it's probably a bad idea to have great commercials and attractive packaging for alcohol products.

To update a point from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (1859), a product can be legal, but pushing the product can be strongly regulated.

Beer and wine will have to remain widely available, but anything stronger can go into clean and safe, but definitely stodgy "Drug Stores" where the single malt scotch can sit next to liquid THC--smoking marijuana should be discouraged--in plain black-on-white packages telling adult customers, as honestly as bureaucrats can, what the drug will do for them, and what it might do to them.

That's one possible outcome, one you might not like, especially if your drug-of-choice is fancy scotch. I won't press the point. What I will press is that we have to move now to serious discussion.

We cannot afford narco-terrorists winning in Afghanistan or in Mexico. We literally can't afford to maintain a large and aging prison population. And we never could afford the dishonesty, nor the class, race, ethnicity, and generational conflict at the corrupt heart of "The War on Drugs."

It's not a war with drugs; it's a set of social issues, including problems in public health. Let's quit the war and get to work on the problems.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor, Miami University (Oxford, OH), who retired to Port Hueneme, CA.