A Tale of Two Wars

We don’t have a drug war in America. We have drug wars. One war gets waged against kids and street creeps. It’s a tough war. You don’t want to get caught in that one.

An entirely different war gets fought against malefactors who happen to be ballplayers, politicians or anyone whose face appears on TV. This is a softy war, a pretend war.

Lately, Southern California has produced wonderful examples of these different wars playing themselves out. First and foremost, of course, is the case of City Councilman Mike Hernandez.

We got to watch on TV as Hernandez toted his baggie across an apartment parking lot, then climbed into his city-purchased car, where the cops say he engaged in a curious sniffing behavior. This ritual continued for weeks, the cops say.

So what are the consequences for Hernandez?

First he gets showered with love--not even tough love!--from his fellow council members, none of whom raise the question of whether Hernandez is fit for office.

Jackie Goldberg calls his problem an “illness” and takes the occasion to scold “American society” about its failure to “grow up” on the drug issue.

When it turns out that Hernandez could, indeed, be forced from office by a rule that requires leave-taking of anyone convicted of a felony, the appropriate loophole is found. Hernandez can’t be “convicted” if he pleads guilty to the felony, see?

Everyone seems delighted with this moral wiggle and assumes Hernandez will employ it successfully as soon as he emerges from rehab.

I could also recap the recent saga of Tony Phillips, leadoff hitter for the Angels, but you already know it. The same kind of bust, pretty much, and the same kind of outcome. Phillips continues to play.

Let’s switch now to the other war. Down in Costa Mesa, 16-year-old Maureen Flynn was president of her class at Estancia High School. Then she drank a beer after a varsity soccer match. The soccer match took place in the summer when school was out.

Didn’t matter. Flynn and seven other girls were tossed out of school. Estancia’s a zero-tolerance school. No arguments, no appeal.

So crushing was the expulsion that one family packed up and moved to Arkansas. All because of a beer.

Not that you can escape this version of the drug war in Arkansas or anywhere else. My favorite story of the crush-the-young-and-powerless variety comes from Portland, Ore., where 13-year-old Adam McMakin headed for his school locker to wash his mouth with Scope.

“Lunch kind of tasted bad,” he said. Sounds just like the school lunches I used to eat. Anyway, he needed a rinse with Scope.

How many of you know that Scope contains some alcohol? Neither did Adam. Pity. He was tossed.

The consequences of the two wars show up in other ways too. No one even pretends, for example, that Hernandez or Phillips will do jail time if convicted. After all, they are first offenders.

Switch now to Todd McCormick, the 27-year-old cancer victim who was growing a nursery of marijuana plants at his rented house in Bel-Air. McCormick says he believed that the California marijuana initiative protected him from prosecution.

Whether he was right or not, we’ll never know because McCormick--a first-time offender like Hernandez and Phillips--was turned over to the feds for prosecution rather than to the state.

And what is the punishment if he is convicted in federal court?

A mandatory 10 years.

What’s happening here, I think, is a splitting that stems from our utter confusion over drugs in the 1990s. We know our drug war strategy, after 30 years of battle, has failed. But we don’t know what will succeed.

So we wash back and forth between the extremes. We get tough, then we go easy. We go after supply, then we go after demand. We blame the user, we blame his mother; we blame the Colombians, we blame the Mexicans; we blame TV; we blame the press; we blame the President, all in order.

And in the confusion, we let some off easy, and we squash others like a bug. A baseball star has a lot of power in our culture. So does anyone who’s been elected to office by the people. They will be blessed in their infractions.

But God help anyone who’s 16 years old and makes a single mistake in the wrong place, at the wrong time. No Jackie Goldbergs will appear to excuse your error. No baseball arbitrator will declare that, by prior agreement, you will be cut some slack.

You will get zero slack. You may even get slapped into a room where you watch TV through the bars. But don’t despair. Maybe the TV will have an Angels game on. Catch the fever.