Michael Phelps as Jackie Robinson: Obama as FDR: Drugism as Racism.

Drug prohibition is destroying the world. Mexico is on the precipice of becoming a failed state. The war on drugs is the reason. Over 5600 human beings were killed in Mexico’s drug wars in 2008. For a little perspective, that’s a 9/11 every six months. Per capita, a Mexican citizen is about twice as likely to get killed in the drug wars as an American is to die from overdosing on a drug from Mexico.

The war on drugs is worldwide, more extensive than Islamist terror and more deadly. In Detroit, South Central, Columbia, Bolivia, Burma, Brazil, and beyond, the morgues are full and the jails are fuller.

We are fighting and dying in Afghanistan for the right to decide who gets control of the poppy fields. Opium is the oil that funds the Taliban and their enforcers, Al Qaeda.

When the Taliban was the government over there, they nearly eliminated poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, and they did it the same way they eliminated Buddha statues. No Geneva convention, no rights of man, so supreme court, just “bloooie!” Problem solved.

But when we kicked them out of Kabul and into Pakistan they had a change of heart about poppy cultivation, because not only was the dope a weapon against the infidels, but it was worth so much you could fund an army with it. So they did.

We might as well ship Kalashnikovs over there and cut out the middle man. We provided them with that weapon. Our idiot laws did that. Just another cost of this fatal fantasy called the war on drugs.

This is madness. This must stop. If the stuff people took illegally was priced at what it actually cost to grow, refine, ship and sell there wouldn’t be enough profit in it to fund a misdemeanor.

February is Black History Month. The airwaves are full of feel-good documentaries about the successful struggles of the first African American basketball player, golfer, football player, debating team, or whatever reasonable facsimile of the Jackie Robinson story the producers can find that hasn’t been done to death already. The villains in the movies are always the same. The maniac racists. Their dripping-fang hatred and ignorance, their near subhuman stupidity scream out at us from the screen, and we feel smug and superior because we’re so far beyond all that we can hardly understand it.

Well, in 2050, when they make whatever holographic neuro-simulations that are the mid-century equivalent of the documentary, the audience will be outraged that we stone-age villains put people in prison for possessing or ingesting a chemical.

“What tyrants,” our grandkids will say. “They thought they owned the inside of everyone’s body! They could send you to jail for decades for a crime nobody would even notice if they didn’t drain your bodily fluids and send them to a lab!”

And when they ask their grandparents (us) why? Why did we let them do it and say nothing, we’ll answer: “It wasn’t me. I was against it all along. The establishment did it to protect the people from themselves. Because it was good for the people.”

“Drug gangs, cartel wars, failed states, terror financing, and millions institutionalized for years and years in horrid, sodomizing jails was good for the people?” Our grandchildren will ask in wide-eyed disbelief.

And then we’ll have to tell them the truth, just before we die, so we can meet our maker without a lie on our lips.

“Well, mostly it was because we just didn’t want to let anyone get high. And by anyone, we meant anyone else, because we all did it at one time or another, each and every one of us. From the homeless on the streets (another bit of history that will make for some great high-concept docudramas in fifty years) to the greatest Olympic champions of our time, to our presidents. Every single hypocritical, lucky-we-didn’t-get-caught-when-we-were-in-college, one of us.”

This is an insane lottery. What would have happened if Barack Obama got caught when, according to his book, he “did a little blow?” At the very best we’d be denied the president who is our best chance to avert economic catastrophe right now. At the worst he’d be living in a halfway house, after serving 20 years.

It is pure, blind luck that didn’t happen. In what biblical version of righteous justice is pure blind luck supposed to be the arbiter of guilt or innocence? How crazy is that? And how much longer are we going to stand for it?

We have to fess up, my fellow Americans. Drugism is the new racism. And like racism, it’s based on a lie that’s been going on for a long, long time.

It is the greatest bullshit story in the history of mankind and everybody knows it. Kids lie to their parents, grow up and lie to their kids, and on and on for generations. The parents know the kids are lying and the kids know the parents are lying and everybody goes along until someone is unlucky enough or stupid enough to get caught. If you get caught by your parents or the neighbor’s folks when you’re blowing joints listening to Pink Floyd with your buddies you’re in for a hell of a talking-to. A real shouting match will ensue.

But if you get caught by the cops, and you’re poor or don’t have a good lawyer, you’re in big trouble. If your family isn’t prosperous or well-connected, if all you have is a single mom with not much of a job, your life might be wrecked. It happens all the time, to the poorer classes in America. It happens to the black kids most of all.

So, come to think of it, we’re not all that different from the fire hose and lynch mob southerners in those civil rights documentaries after all. They had the laws on their side too, for as far back as anyone could remember. Until those laws were changed.

Drug overdoses are tragic, mostly involuntary suicides. Drug war deaths are mass murder. The former is a human frailty that can never be totally eliminated. The latter is a policy-made disaster that can be unmade by changing the policy. All it takes is a little courage.

During the last depression, FDR took the opportunity to get rid of a destructive, unenforceable, crime-enabling prohibition. Obama should take the bong by the bowl and do the same with our brutal, nation-wrecking, life-destroying, war-enabling prohibition.

Given a little courage we can overcome this, too. Let’s make Michael Phelps our Jackie Robinson.