Millie: A cautionary tale of America's longest war

Imagine there were no drug dealers on our city streets There were no cartels perpetrating atrocities on our nation's borders. There were no hapless victims of the drug war committing crimes or prostituting themselves to get their next fix Our prisons were emptied of small time drug dealers and their victims, the drug dependent, the mentally ill, the casual pleasure seeker The Taliban could no longer finance their bombs and guns with money from Afghan heroin Our courts were free to provide timely justice for non-drug related crime The drug dependent among us receiving treatment, rehabilitation, even maintenance instead of incarceration Is this just a pipe dream or is it the reality we have failed to properly pursue? Must there be an endless, futile war on people who seek drugs for pleasure, to relieve symptoms of depression or other mental illness, or because they became addicted as children or adolescents driven by social or other pressures? Is the drug war to remain an open, never to be healed wound of American society, a blight to which we have habituated ourselves, a racist threat to black America, a windfall for the purveyors of prisons, alcohol, illicit substances, and jurisprudence? Dr. Goodman, through his protagonist, Millie, a promising youngster who becomes addicted to heroin with relatively little disruption in her life and career, leads us through the devastating consequences of the drug war to the highest court in the land to question its constitutionality. 1