The Kings Of Cool

144

Scylla and Charibdis.

The rock and the hard place.

Either Ben cooperates with Cain or Cain throws him back to OGR and Boland, who are going to be, shall we say, vindictive.

Ben needs a move and he doesn’t have one.

He wishes Chon were here to help him think it through, but as they say in football, there is no play in the book for fourth and twenty-three.

It’s all so fucking stupid, Ben thinks in his frustration.

Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1973.

Thirty-plus years later, billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and the war goes on, and for what?

Nothing.

Well, not nothing, Ben thinks; it makes money.

The antidrug establishment rakes in billions of dollars-DEA, Customs, Border Patrol, ICE, thousands of state and local antidrug units, not to mention prisons. Seventy-something percent of convicts are behind bars for a drug-related crime, at an average cost of $50K a year, not to mention that most of their families are on welfare, and about the only growth industry in America right now is prison construction.

Billions on prisons, billions more trying to keep drugs from coming across the border while schools have to hold bake sales to buy books and paper and pencils, so I guess the idea is to keep our kids safe from drugs by making them as stupid as the politicians who perpetuate this insanity.

Follow the money.

The War on Drugs?

The Whore on Drugs.

He’s in the middle of this happy thought when the doorbell rings.