Let's leave the events in Denver behind and talk about an ongoing idiotic drain on our economy, and an ongoing idiotic assault on our personal liberties, and an altogether idiotic waste of time and money that didn't come up in the debate. I speak, of course, of what Scott Lemieux over at LG&M unfailiingly calls the "war on (some classes people who take some classes of) drugs."

We've got an exploding chamber of horrors going on in Boston right now, where the duplicity and dishonesty — and the possible actual crimes — of a chemist in the state crime lab may well empty the prisons faster than the crackpot right would have you believe Michael Dukakis ever did....

Forensics specialists interviewed by the Globe say the lab's procedures appear to have been fairly standard, including having two chemists test every sample, but they were still not enough to prevent an ambitious chemist's rampant breaches of lab protocol, apparently to boost her performance record. In the process, investigators say, Dookhan has jeopardized the reliability of drug evidence used in 34,000 cases during her nine-year career.

How do you "boost your performance record" in our war on drugs? If you're a street cop, you plant evidence. If you're a prosecutor, you bury discovery material. And, if you're a chemist, you phony up lab results to the post where 34,000 arrests may be tainted, because our war on drugs demands arrests over constitutional guarantees, convictions over due process, and evidence over common sense. This has seeped into every corner of our lives. Our kids forfeit even the most minimal Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections as soon as they step inside a schoolhouse, a lesson that a lot of people hope they carry forward throughout their lives. The criminal justice system — both the actual one and, too often, the one we see portrayed in our popular culture — treat the most rudimentary safeguards as loopholes, or obstacles to be overcome by clever prosecutors. I can assure you that, until she got caught with both thumbs on the scale, Annie Dookhan was producing exactly the kind of results that most of this country kept saying it wanted. Certainly, they were the kind of results that Antonin Scalia, Scott Brown's most fave Supreme Court justice, slavers over. Don't believe me? Ask Lindsay Earls.

Don't expect this to come up in any debates anywhere anytime soon. Certainly, nothing in our politics argues any differently. Even in Boston, this is being played politically as a blow to Governor Deval Patrick and to Attorney General Martha Coakley. The basic premises of the war on drugs are never seriously challenged by any politician who ever will have the power to turn off this powerful engine of authoritarian corruption. (Sorry, Gary Johnson.) This kind of scandal is altogether inevitable and it stands as a perfect statement of what the war on drugs is really all about. Turns out those PSA's were right. Drugs will make you crazy.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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