The words “drug czar” say more about the futility of endless war than all the words written about war.
The title is as foreign as it sounds: a Russification of American politics not by trolls and viruses, but an infiltration just the same. A corruption of the state by the administrative state. An abuse of power because of the absence of enumerated and limited powers. An invitation to interdict and a warrant to indict—a virtual guarantee to secure indictments against the most insignificant pushers and the least resistant mules—so as to further overcrowd our prisons and ensure perpetual unemployment among nonviolent felons.
To paraphrase the political journalist Michael Kinsley, the real scandal is what is legal: the transformation of doctors into drug dealers.
By signing so many prescriptions for opioids, doctors consign their patients to lives of further despair and dependency until, without the proper paper to have a pharmacist tender another bottle of poison, the living dead commit crimes to steal enough money—to exchange the necessary legal tender—to get high.
Meanwhile, the reach of the administrative state runs deeper than the roots of any plant or tree, with the drug czar as our agronomist-in-chief. He wages war against this poppy and that leaf, rejecting pleas for the use of ibogaine while ignoring the ineffectiveness of conventional forms of drug treatment.
And so, the war continues.
And so, it shall continue unless, through an act of moral health and martial vigor, we convert the killing fields—the fields where the poppies burn, rather than blow—into a sacred place where the larks still bravely sing.
Let us end this war. Let us cease this quarrel.