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I fought the war

"It was twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play." When the Beatles sang those first words on the eponymous track of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, nothing in my life had happened twenty years ago.

"It was twenty years ago today,

Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play."

When the Beatles sang those first words on the eponymous track of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, nothing in my life had happened twenty years ago. But the driving chords, stabbing guitar and words were a hook that lodged in my - and I suspect almost everyone else's - head, an association that probably won't end until I end or dementia robs me of all but my earliest memories.

It was quite a few years later that I first began a sentence with that phrase. "It was twenty years ago..." The sound of those words, and the accompanying soundtrack spooling instantaneously through my head, froze me in my tracks and I dropped the sentence into the well of unfinished thoughts. "OMG, I didn't just say that, did I?" It shocked me that I was about to relate a tale of something or other that had happened, something I personally remembered experiencing, two decades earlier. It was an even greater shock to realize that whatever it was seemed so crystal clear and fresh in my memory.

It wasn't any easier the second time the words tumbled out, or the third or the fourth. But in time it became less traumatic. The music never stopped but the thoughts and stories continued. A pang of déjà vu tied me in a knot the first time I substituted 30 years for 20 as the milepost marking the sentence, but by then I'd grown accustomed to, if not comfortable with, the variant of relativity theories that makes time seem to accelerate the older we get, compressing ancient experiences into fresh memories and stupefying those around us who wonder why we're telling them tales older than they are.

The shock washed over me anew last month when I was reminded the various governments I've lived under for most of my life have been at war with me for, gulp, 40 years! Yes, boys and girls, it was 40 years ago - cue music - this July that Richard Nixon, the man we all thought had a lock on the Worst President Ever award until George Bush the Younger came along, declared war on drugs. Notwithstanding last month's announcement by the Office of National Drug Control Policy that the Obama administration will no longer use the term, the war continues to rage.

While I've tried to maintain a status of conscientious objector in the war on drugs, at least one side considers me an enemy combatant and would, if they could, spirit me away to any one of the many Gitmos scattered like so many high-security M&Ms across every community in North America. A shocking number of those prisons have been built solely to house, at great expense to the state and at even greater expense to the individuals, people who would rather unwind after a long day in the corporate trenches with a puff rather than with a socially-approved, government-taxed drink.

Oh, the governments pitched in the fevered battle never said they were squandering the money to incarcerate potheads, but during the last three of those four decades, the U.S. prison population serving time for drug crimes ballooned from around 41,000 to half a million. The stats for the first decade are lost to history because until war was declared, no one thought it significant enough to track.

Canadian tokers can feel slightly, but only slightly, safer pursuing their pleasure on this side of the border. While most Canuck cops don't pursue potheads with the same singlemindedness the assorted Sheriff Andys to the south do, Canadian prison populations are still swollen with people whose plan to live a perfectly normal, if somewhat stoned life, has been forever shattered by one of the stormtroopers from the other side of the trenches.

In an ironic way, Nixon's - and his successors' - War on Drugs eerily foreshadowed the precipitous decline in the U.S.' overall success rate in waging real wars against real(sic) foes. Let's see, since declaring war on drugs, the only real fighting war the U.S. has managed to "win" has been... Granada? Ah yes, the war to ensure the unfettered right of middle-class kids, with less than impressive academic records, to attend second-rate medical schools in tropical settings. It was a stirring sight, although no really good war songs managed to be written about it.

But like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and the War on Terror, the War on Drugs has been one long, inextricable quagmire, draining spirit, economic resources and vitality that could have been put to much better uses had anyone combined half a brain with political will.

Well into the 1960s, stories would emerge occasionally about some poor sap, some ancient Japanese soldier being discovered on a remote island in the South Pacific who was still fighting World War II. He'd be dressed in rags, emaciated, terminally perplexed and suspended in utter shock and disbelief when tourists in tacky Hawaiian shirts would try to explain to him, (a) the war was over and, well, had been for several decades, (b) they didn't know why no one had told him and, (c) oh yeah, you lost. With failing eyesight, compromised health and a shiny, well-oiled rifle, the confused samurai would descend into catatonia trying to decided whether these gaily-dressed people were in fact enemy soldiers in unusual camo or civilians bearing bad news.

North American governments at all levels are not far removed from those addled, ancient warriors. They see the evidence, they compile the statistics, they witness the social cost but they just can't believe the overwhelming message: THE WAR'S OVER - DRUGS WON!

Okay, maybe that message is too blunt. Drugs didn't win the war. Drugs never actually engaged in warfare. Drugs just are. And there will always be people who want to use them. Some will do so and get on with life. Some will meet a bad end. But it takes a certain kind of Einstein to ignore Einstein's admonition about fools who keep doing the same thing and expecting the outcome to be different. Governments have been fighting the same war with the same weapons and achieving the same results - failure - for four decades now. Isn't it about time to try something else? Something that doesn't waste enormous amounts of money that could be put to better uses? Something that doesn't turn potentially productive people into criminals? Something that doesn't make building and staffing prisons a growth industry?

Of course it is. And, of course, they won't. Maybe in another 40 years.

The folly of playing out this endless end game is slowly, glacially, becoming more clear to more people. We can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons. How in the world are we going to suppress them in open, democratic societies?

But until someone wakes up all the old soldiers, the war continues.