Prohibition has been in place for several generations. Once you get a bad idea past the first generation and into the unconscious assumptions of the next generation, absurdity is sort of magically transformed into logic. Nonsense becomes common sense. Because the younger generation has always lived with the nonsense, they can't imagine things being any other way. Common sense sounds like nonsense to them. The effect hardens with each new generation. The obvious and most parsimonious explanation, as well as the simple objective solution, is psychologically transformed into a frightening absurdity and avoided. This "bumps" the adaptive solution of the problem out of psychological reach, creating a vicious cycle where the problem is cultivated and encouraged to grow and mutate. This is the stuff psychotic disorders are made of. Once the cycle gains inertia, it almost inevitably plays out to the bitter end -- eventual denial of the reality of death and a willingness to die to protect the primary delusion and the perpetually expanding web of higher order delusions which have been developed to protect the primary delusion.

I suspect the inertia of the prohibition sickness is energetic enough to render the drug war problem immutable for all practical purposes. In fact, I am quite sure it is. I think it will destroy our civilization. Since we refuse to accept the reality, we are doomed to eventually turn this simple denial mechanism into a world war, or whatever the equivalent of world war is in the context of the new technology. It will inevitably destroy the ethical infrastructure of our society, and the order will quickly decay after that.

The administration is currently remodeling the aging War in Terror into a new War on "Narco" Terror, as predicted by Jeralyn and as we are seeing in the news. Fixing up used wars is a sign of denial. It rarely works out well.

The madness simply keeps getting transformed, amplified and passed on. All constructive activity and creativity is focused on finding new and more sophisticated ways to deny reality and basically cut off our noses to spite our face. The only "acceptable" solutions (interdiction, reduction of demand, disruption of supply, quarantine of users, etc.) require that we deny, at any cost, the simple objective facts which contain the only real solution (decriminalization). It is the classic kind of vicious circle psychiatrists use to explain the workings of the psychotic mind.

So, as a country and as a society, we have a thought disorder. It continues to grow and feed off of itself, demanding that we deny reality at every juncture and that we construct new delusions to patch up what remains of the damaged infrastructure.

Drug therapy has proven to be a very effective solution when this type of information processing disorder gets a grip on an individual. I am not sure enough is understood about the mechanisms of the psychological effects of those drugs to construct a model of what could be done for a society suffering from an information processing disorder of this type.