THE BORDER REPORT

The Feds are calling for an end to the bogged down thinking behind the War on Drugs, an ambitious idea with many immediate benefits – except that where the government wants to spend its anti-drug money these days suggests the Feds aren’t so much intent on ending the war on drugs as they are on moving the battlefield a little south.

Last week, the new drug czar took the stage, saying the analogy of a “war on drugs” was understood more as a war on people than a war on a substance and that this type of thinking needed to change.

The newly confirmed head of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy told the Wall Street Journal that the phrase only served as a barrier to dealing with the profound challenges behind substance abuse and addiction.

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

No, he’s right; I agree with what he’s saying. We’ve been fighting a drug war since the Nixon Administration and have had no impact whatsoever. Marijuana smoking is so prevalent, even the president freely admits to having smoked it. Meth replaces crack cocaine. E replaces coke as the party drug, and somewhere in some outback shack in Florida, kids shifted from huffing White-Out and are puffing their own feces.

No end in sight.

But what grabbed my attention was the last sentence of his carefully chosen words; seems as clear a qualifier as any I’ve ever read.

Apparently, we’re no longer at war with people “in this country.” Other countries have become an entirely different matter altogether.

Take a look at Page Three of the Appropriations Committee’s summary of its 2009 Supplemental Appropriations for Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Pandemic Flu.

The Feds would like to spend $470 million by supporting the Mexican government’s “war against organized crime and drug trafficking.”

The motivator is to stem violence along the Mexican frontier, a fantasy that Congress seems fixated on, inspiring images of grenade attacks in El Paso and Joaquín Chapo Guzmán landing at San Francisco International with an escort of renegade FBI agents before he’s whisked off in an armored Suburban to the Bohemian Grove comes to mind.

Most of the money would go toward arming the Mexican government with three Black Hawk helicopters as well as X-ray machines for inspection points, wiretaps and more anti-corruption training because Mexico hasn’t had enough of that.

Not part of the budget but equally … interesting is the United States’ new usage of satellite spying technology to monitor the border. Recently, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a Defense Department branch, revealed that it’s been tracking drug loads coming into the country but it has stayed away from monitoring the U.S. side of the border and instead keeps an eye on the Mexican side. It’s a little schizophrenic how much effort goes into comforting one populace at the expense of another.

We’re entering a new and very curious paradigm shift in drug law thinking. On the one hand, the U.S. government wants to abandon the whole notion of a war on drugs because it’s perceived as a war on people, and presumably, they mean a war on poor people. On the other hand, we can’t seem to arm the Mexicans enough for their own war.