This being a national holiday, it’s entirely proper that we give thanks for the characteristics of this nation that make it possible for most of us to enjoy good fortune and comfortable circumstances. 
  Our country’s natural bounty doesn’t guarantee the freedom to enjoy good living. Our Constitution does that, or at least it did. 
  As the nation has grown from a young, adventuresome, sparsely populated country to become cautious and sedate in middle age, we’ve let our freedoms dwindle along the way. 
  The increase in population density is partly responsible. You can’t be as free in an apartment building in a big city as you can on a farm or ranch. 
  We’d fight in the streets if our government suspended the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but we quietly go about our business when gross restrictions to liberty and freedom are committed, when the Constitution is abrogated every day in the name of our modern Crusade. 
  The War on Drugs is a phony war to begin with. It’s a war on some drugs. Some of the wealthiest corporations in America produce, advertise, and sell drugs. Good drugs. Good because they’re legal, and legal because we say they are. 
  It’s a war on bad drugs, uncontrolled drugs, drugs that don’t come in plastic bottles with childproof caps. Drugs that differ from good drugs primarily in that they are illegal, and illegal because we say they are. 
  Before we divided drugs into the good and the bad, cocaine was the coke in Coke. Little old ladies, along with everybody else, consumed opiates and other drugs in over-the-counter popular medicines. 
  Some people abused drugs, of course, and became addicted to various narcotics, but drugs didn’t do much damage to society. 
  Since we’ve divided drugs into good and bad, those who deal in bad drugs have found ways to make mild, bulky drugs into potent concentrates more easily smuggled. Instead of druggies being high on cocaine, now they’re crazy on crack. 
  Abuse of drugs is self-destructive, but there will always be self-destructive people among us. What we’ve done is force many of them to become destructive of the rest of us by encouraging development of more potent, more addictive, bad drugs with our oppressive policies. 
  Collateral damage in this holy war is not limited to innocent people caught up in an inflexible legal system. The worst damage so far has been to the Constitution, and by extension, to all of us. 
  Graham Boyd and Jack Hitt, in the December issue of Harper’s, list some of the ways in which our guaranteed rights have been eroded and lost and illustrate their points with human examples. 
  The Supreme Court allows police to smash down doors without warning and without evidence of crime beyond the unsupported word of some snitch that drugs are involved. Sometimes the raiders kill innocent people in drug raids, sometimes at wrong addresses. Searches without good cause by British troops helped fire the rebellion that gave birth to our nation, and now we do it to ourselves. 
  In the name of the Crusade, police can seize and sell your property without even charging you with a crime. They can keep your car or house or live savings for themselves if you can’t prove your property is not the fruit of illegal drugs. 
  Mandatory sentencing put an elderly, devout Mormon couple in prison for ten years. Their crime? They drove a motor home across the border from Mexico for a friend. The walls of the vehicle were stuffed with cocaine. The “friend” disappeared. The judge had no choice. The couple has been in prison seven years. They lead other prisoners in Bible study. 
  The unwinnable War on Drugs is damaging American society more severely than drugs themselves ever could. 
  And we said, “No more Vietnams.” 
  Enjoy your turkey.