Wasted Days And Wasted Nights

You may be heartened to hear that President Obama's withdrawal from Afghanistan is still "on track," meaning that he expects to begin bringing troops home in July of next year. Billions of dollars and several years later, we're hoping to limp on out of there next year with a democracy in place and the Taliban extinct. Good luck, I say.
The War On Drugs turned forty the other day. That's a four and a zero. Way back in 1970, Richard Nixon made Elvis Presley a special agent for the FBI, in hopes of stemming the tide of hippie drug culture that the Beatles had brought over from Liverpool. Elvis was probably whacked out of his gourd at the time, but there are plenty of photos to prove it. Thus began the first early campaigns of a struggled that has lasted four decades and cost America more than one trillion dollars in the process. That's fifteen zeroes.
In the eighties, Crockett and Tubbs kept south Florida safe from smugglers and drug kingpins while the rest of the country found themselves face-down in the mirror, snorting up all that new found wealth and prosperity. The nineties were all about a return to traditional values, as we were assured by our charismatic new president that he did not inhale. By the turn of the century, we were all so worried about what was going to happen when our computers could not produce the right date that we all got wasted for another ten years.
And now we've begun our withdrawal. This week our new charismatic president, who does inhale when he smokes those Marlboro Reds, promised to “reduce drug use and the great damage it causes” with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment. California would very much like to forget that pot was ever illegal and start selling spleef in vending machines to cure the outbreak of glaucoma that is becoming so pervasive as well as bringing millions of dollars in tax revenue back into the treasury.
I guess that's what we get for declaring war on a concept. Maybe next we should declare war on fun.