Remember the war on drugs? George Bush waving a plastic bag of crack bought across the street from the White House during a nationally televised speech? The Pentagon planning to station an aircraft carrier off the coast of Colombia to monitor suspected drug smugglers? Candidates for political office proffering urine samples and daring their opponents to do the same? The appointment of combative William J. Bennett as the nation's first drug czar, a post from which he would coordinate an all-out assault on a menace that seemed to threaten the very survival of the U.S.?
Though those events now seem like...